Book Digest: May 22, 2006
This past week, book-business types and then some gathered in Washington, D.C., to do commerce and rub shoulders at the big annual industry gathering known as BookExpo America. I hope some good comes of this melee—many of the then-some types are filing web reports, which I have not, for my own snobbish reasons, read. There is much distribution of advance reader’s editions and then subsequent gloating followed by inauthentic pissing and moaning about the overwhelming onslaught and burden of new books. But obviously, (relatively) many people enjoy this sport.
This week the big stone in my shoe has been the ridiculous and puerile parlor game the New York Times Book Review foisted on unsuspecting readers, answering a not-exactly-burning question: What was the best book of the past 25 years? (I must in all fairness note that AO Scott’s accompanying essay covers some smart territory. The lucky ones of you missed it and the smart ones (by my reckoning) dismissed this odiferous brain flatulence. More surprisingly, as much as I tried to incite some, there was little commotion about this crass publicity stunt. That being said, it occurs to me that of the noted books that follow, it would be surprising if 20 percent of them showed up on the New York Times’sradar. For which reason I some time ago have dismissed the relevance and utility of the Times book coverage. Nyah-nah-nyah-nah-nah.
With the above in mind I thought of these insights by David Foster Wallace:
Wrigleyworld: A Season in Baseball’s Best Neighborhood by Kevin Kaduk
Those who have followed the long ascendant arc of my brilliant career are doubtless cognizant of my constant reminders that 1) I am a Jew, and 2) I am from Chicago. Thus it will come as no surprise that I would take note of this book about the Chicago Tribune Cubs home field—though I don’t recall a book on this topic since Barry Gifford’sThe Neighborhood of Baseball. Is it a good book? A bad book? Who cares?
» Read an excerpt from Wrigleyworld
Playing President: My Relationships with Nixon, Carter, Bush I, Reagan, and Clinton—and How They Did Not Prepare Me for George W. Bush by Robert Scheer
This title certainly tips off what this book is about. (What else do you need to know?) Former longtime Los Angeles Times writer Robert Scheer—whom Gore Vidal, in this book’s introduction, includes in the front row of journalist historians such as Murray Kempton, Walter Lippman, Richard Rovere (and I add Richard Reeves)—has assembled 30-plus years of his dispatches.
From a recent interview with Scheer:
Do you think American voters care enough about the substance of policy?
» Read an excerpt from Playing President
Send in the Idiots: Stories From the Other Side of Autism by Kamran Nazeer
Itinerant Pakistani Kamran Nazeer, who has lived in New York, Jidda, Islamabad, and Glasgow, attended an experimental school with autistic children and now, years later, he tracks down four of the students and provides vivid accounts of their embattled lives. Paul Collins, who has a son diagnosed as autistic, says of Send in the Idiots, “It’s a question that everyone has asked themselves: What happened to those kids I knew in grade school? But when those kids were in an autism classroom, it’s a question you never expect to get answered…until now. This is a brilliant look inside a world of outsiders—a story not just of autistic children and their fate in the world, but of how all of us grow, grow apart, and sometimes even find our own way in the long journey from childhood to adulthood.”
» Read an excerpt from Send in the Idiots
Brutal: The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger’s Irish Mob by Kevin Weeks and Phyllis Karas
Not counting the Sacco and Vanzetti case, Boston boasts two major true-crime stories: the Boston Strangler/Albert De Salvo puzzle (which has been recently dragged back into the daylight by Sebastian Junger’s Death in Belmont) and the never-ending, or at least unfinished, tale of Whitey Bulger. Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill’s Black Mass is the definitive book, with an excellent overview of the governmental corruption and incompetence surrounding the fugitive Bulger’s story. “Reputed” mobster Bulger apparently operated with impunity for a good long while, abetted by the FBI. And his brother Billy was one of the most powerful politicians in the Commonwealth. Later brother Billy cashed in his chips by being appointed head of the state university system with an imperial salary and opulent cache of perks. Recently, local radio blowhard Howie Carr weighed in with his own book, The Brothers Bulger. Now Phyllis Karas, who teaches journalism at Boston University, delivers her second book on the Bulger mob, helping Kevin Weeks—another mob enforcer—tell his story, which has occasioned a small (for now) backlash by self-styled mob crime expert Jay Atkinson. No doubt it is a signal of the darkly compelling complexity of the Bulger mythology that squabbling has broken out.
» Read an excerpt from Brutal
Voices of Time: A Life in Stories by Eduardo Galeano, translated by Mark Fried
Since I discovered Eduardo Galeano via a New Yorker profile of him by Lawrence Weschler, I have admired his writing, beginning with his unparalleled trilogy Memories of Fire:
Voices of Time comprises 341 stories from Galeano’s life, with Peruvian illustrations thousands of years old, which he rightfully points out are eerily fresh, adorning many pages. He explains, “When they were still loose threads and not yet part of one cloth, a few of these stories were published in newspapers and magazines. In the process of weaving, the original changed their color and shape.”
» Read an excerpt from Voices of Time
The Foreign Correspondent by Alan Furst
Alan Furst has (correctly, I think) been enshrined with masters of the political thriller such as Graham Greene, Eric Ambler, and John LeCarre. In slightly less than two decades Furst has written Night Soldiers, Dark Star, The Polish Officer, The World at Night, Red Gold, Kingdom of Shadows, Blood of Victory, Dark Voyage, and now The Foreign Correspondent—all riveting novels of Europe in the grips of World War II. Here’s the publisher’s description of the new book:
The Foreign Correspondent
And yes, once more the Brasserie Heininger makes an appearance.
» Read an excerpt from The Foreign Correspondent
Camus at “Combat”: Writing 1944-1947 edited by Jacqueline Levi Valensi, translated by Arthur Goldhammer
Algerian born Nobel Laureate Albert Camus was a big thing when I was an undergraduate. (Once again, I launch an initiative to retire a certain—you know the one—cliché.) So were berets and Jean-Luc Godard films and Jean-Paul Belmondo. This is the first English translation presenting all 165 of Camus’s World War II and early postwar writings published in Combat, the resistance newspaper where he served as editor-in-chief and editorial writer between 1944 and 1947. Here’s what the Nobel Committee said of him:
Personally Camus has moved far beyond nihilism. His serious, austere meditations on the duty of restoring without respite that which has been ravaged, and of making justice possible in an unjust world, rather make him a humanist who has not forgotten the worship of Greek proportion and beauty as they were once revealed to him in the dazzling summer light on the Mediterranean shore at Tipasa.
My kind of guy—indeed.
» Read an excerpt from Camus at “Combat”
The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel by Amy Hempel, with an introduction by Rick Moody
This tome represents the complete collected work of Amy Hempel of nearly 30 years—48 stories from four previously published collections. Don’t feel like a dummy if you haven’t read any of her work. Uh, well, maybe. Rick Moody introduces Hempel:
It’s all about the sentences. It’s about the way sentences move in the paragraphs. It’s about the rhythm. It’s about ambiguity. It’s about the way emotion, in difficult circumstances, gets captured in language. It’s about the instant of consciousness. It’s about besieged consciousness. It’s about love terrible. It’s about death. It’s about suicides. It’s about the body. It’s about skepticism. It’s against sentimentality. It’s against cheap sentiment. It’s about regret. It’s about survival. It’s about the sentences used to enact and defend survival.
This, of course, has something to do with Amy Hempel. Honest.
The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo by Peter Orner
I recently had the pleasure of chatting with novelist Susan Straight about this and that. And she was effusive in her praise of Peter Orner’s debut novel. And apparently West Coast writers are a clubby bunch, as novelist Michelle Richmond attests by her account of attending a San Francisco reading by Orner at the soon-to-be-lamented A Clean Well-Lighted Place. Peter Orner’s novel is set in Namibia just after independence in the early 1990s, at Goas, an all-boys Catholic primary school in the remote veldt. Mavala Shikongo, a combat veteran who fought in Namibia’s long war for independence against South Africa, returns to the school, husbandless—with a child. Emotional havoc ensues as Mavala’s modernity conflicts with the hide-bound conservatism endemic to Goas’s isolated culture. Additionally, the men in this story seem to find her irresistible—which almost always means trouble.
Best of Tin House: Stories foreword by Dorothy Allison
Tin House, an eight-year-old literary quarterly, has consistently published some of the best short-form fiction in America, making this best-of a real bonanza—I’m going to name names here: Steve Almond, Aimee Bender, David Benioff, Amy Bloom, Deborah Eisenberg, Robert Olen Butler, Denis Johnson, Martha McPhee, Anthony Swofford, Jim Shepard, Elizabeth Tallent, and others. Here’s Francine Prose, no slouch herself, opining on Tin House’s glories:
Tin House