Medicis, Oppenheimer, Alien Lizard Star in Latest Paperbacks
(The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of Bloomberg.)
By Edward Nawotka
May 9 (Bloomberg) -- Lorenzo de Medici, physicist Richard Feynman, actor Eli Wallach and a talking alien lizard are just some of the characters featured in the latest paperback releases.
Nonfiction
``American Mania: When More Is Not Enough'' by Peter Whybrow (Norton): Psychiatrist Whybrow suggests that our brain chemistry and natural risk-and-reward system may prevent many of us from taking satisfaction in our extreme affluence.
``The Good, the Bad, and Me: In My Anecdotage'' by Eli Wallach (Harcourt): This memoir by a first-class raconteur collects Hollywood stories from his 50-year career, starting with the Actors Studio and ranging through roles from ``The Magnificent Seven'' to ``Mystic River.''
``The Silicon Eye: Microchip Swashbucklers and the Future of High-Tech Innovation'' by George Gilder (Norton): The story of Foveon, a maker of chips for digital cameras, as it fights to gain a share of the $2 billion market with a new product.
``American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer'' by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin (Vintage): This year's winner of the Pulitzer Prize for biography is a magisterial portrait of the physicist who built the atom bomb and struggled with the consequences for the rest of his life.
``Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track: The Letters of Richard Feynman'' edited by Michelle Feynman (Basic Books): The late bongo-playing physicist who solved the riddle of why the Challenger shuttle exploded displays wit, smarts and charm in these letters selected by his daughter.
``Faith at War: A Journey on the Frontlines of Islam, From Baghdad to Timbuktu'' by Yaroslav Trofimov (Picador): A Wall Street Journal reporter describes his three-year, post-9/11 journey crisscrossing of the Muslim world, with its array of Islamic cultures and much open hostility to the U.S.
``Embroideries'' by Marjane Satrapi (Pantheon): The third graphic novel from the Iranian emigre reveals the surprising sex lives of Iranian women in simple yet provocative black-and-white drawings.
``Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics, and Art in Fifteenth- Century Florence'' by Tim Parks (Norton): Parks, best known for his novels set in Italy, shows how Cosimo and Lorenzo ``The Magnificent'' de Medici built a fortune while trying to avoid arrest by the Catholic Church for usury.
``The Decline of the West'' by Oswald Spengler (Vintage): This reprint abridges Spengler's original edition, first published in Germany in 1918, of his influential survey of world history, among the first books to suggest that civilizations rise and fall in cycles.
``Chasing the Rodeo: On Wild Rides and Big Dreams, Broken Hearts and Broken Bones, and One Man's Search for the West'' by W.K. Stratton (Harcourt): This vivid memoir of the author's search of his ``rodeo bum'' father takes Stratton to tiny cow towns across the West and along a sports circuit pungent with leather, dung and adrenaline.
``Oh the Glory of It All'' by Sean Wilsey (Penguin): The son of a San Francisco butter magnate and a gossip columnist serves up this portrait of the artist as a young, rich misfit, from skateboarding punk to reform-school reject.
``De Kooning: An American Master'' by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan (Knopf): The authors won a Pulitzer for this page- turning biography of the Dutch-born painter who pioneered abstract expressionism.
``Eat This Book: A Year of Gorging and Glory on the Competitive Eating Circuit'' by Ryan Nerz (St. Martin's Griffin): Nerz documents the year he spent gorging on everything from Nathan's hot dogs to matzo balls as a competitor in the most revolting sport on the planet.
``Nature Noir: A Park Ranger's Patrol in the Sierra'' by Jordan Fisher Smith (Mariner): Smith takes the romance out of the forest idyll in relating his 14 years working a 48-mile stretch of Sierra Nevada river canyons frequented by as many dope fiends and armed miners as bird watchers and campers.
``Whatever You Think, Think the Opposite'' by Paul Arden (Portfolio): Arden, a former creative director at Saatchi & Saatchi, offers this sequel to his best-selling ``It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want to Be'' -- more visual jokes, aphorisms and self-help platitudes meant to provoke lateral thinking.
Fiction
``A Long Way Down'' by Nick Hornby (Riverhead): Hip British author Hornby returned after his lighthearted hits ``High Fidelity'' and ``How to Be Good'' with a novel about four Londoners who accidentally meet on New Year's Eve when all four plan to commit suicide by jumping off the same building.
``Acts of Faith'' by Philip Caputo (Vintage): The author of ``A Rumor of War'' sets his new novel amid the aid workers, missionaries and mercenaries involved in the ongoing war in the Sudan, where an American pilot changes from flying food to smuggling arms and an evangelical Christian falls in love with a rebel leader.
``The Ha-Ha'' by Dave King (Back Bay): The story of how brain-damaged Vietnam vet Howard Kapostash, who hasn't spoken in the 30 years since the war, finds his voice when his ex- girlfriend Sylvia, heading into rehab, dumps her 9-year-old son on him.
``The Club Dumas'' by Arturo Perez-Reverte (Harcourt): Demonology and swashbuckling action are part of this intricate, international bestseller about a 19th-century bibliophile- detective.
``The History of Love'' by Nicole Krauss (Norton): One of the finest novels of last year, this tells of the intersecting lives of octogenarian locksmith Leo Gursky as he tries to stave off loneliness in his dotage and 14-year-old Alma Singer, who reminds him that love lasts.
``Specimen Days'' by Michael Cunningham (Picador): The author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning ``The Hours'' returned with three interconnected novellas that track a man, a woman and a boy across three centuries of New York history and on into the future, where one morphs into a talking alien lizard.
``Haunted'' by Chuck Palahniuk (Anchor): This collection of 23 horror stories by the author of ``Fight Club'' and other perverse novels of adolescent fantasy is often so sick and twisted that some listeners passed out when he read them on his book tour.
``Indecision'' by Benjamin Kunkel (Random House): The much- hyped debut novel stars Dwight B. Wilmerding, a 28-year-old with a crummy job at Pfizer and an anemic love life. His malaise prompts him to use some of his employer's products and leads him into drugs and self-discovery in Ecuador.
``Trance'' by Christopher Sorrentino (Picador): This experimental novel, a finalist for the 2005 National Book Award, fictionalizes the day-to-day lives of members of the 1972 Symbionese Liberation Army as they shoplift socks, fret over sunglasses, and abduct and assimilate Patty Hearst.
``The Third Brother'' by Nick McDonell (Grove): A thriller about a Columbia University student working in Hong Kong who is sent to Bangkok to write about drug tourism and hunt down a missing journalist. The trail brings him back to New York just as it is engulfed in the horror of 9/11.
``Visigoth'' by Gary Amdahl (Milkweed): A gritty collection of eight short stories, set mostly in Minnesota and Alaska, about modern men -- middle managers, politicians, athletes and bad husbands -- who covet power, sex and success and aren't afraid to use violence to get it.
Thursday, May 11, 2006
Tuesday, May 02, 2006
Oh, the story behind it all, Q&A with Sean Wilsey
Oh, the story behind it all
Sean Wilsey gives an inside look into his memoir, talks about his Texas ties.
By Edward Nawotka
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Sunday, April 30, 2006
I had the type of childhood — one that included eight years of Catholic military school — that prompts people to say after too much wine at dinner parties, "You should write about that!" I think, recklessly, "Yeah!"
Then I read a book like Sean Wilsey's "Oh the Glory of It All," a voluminous tell-all about growing up the scion of a San Francisco butter magnate who tooled around in helicopters and a narcissistic gossip-columnist mother. And it sobers me.
Wilsey's book is, in a word, Joycean. Generation X Joycean: Portrait of the Artist as a Young, Rich Screw-up. Just like Joyce's coming-of-age masterpiece, Wilsey's book features a long, harrowing stint at an elitist boarding school, St. Mark's in Southborough, Mass., and a God-like figure of dread: his wicked stepmother Dede, whom he finds himself fantasizing about sexually.
It's creepy and compelling and oh so tantalizing.
An editor-at-large for McSweeney's literary magazine, Wilsey is also co-editor of the forthcoming essay collection "The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup" (which includes a contribution about Ecuador from Austin's Jake Silverstein). He comes to town this week as part of the publicity tour for the paperback edition of "Oh the Glory of It All."
Wilsey spoke with us by phone from his home in New York City.
Austin American-Statesman: Your memoir is mostly about San Francisco, but don't you also have some strong Texas connections?
Sean Wilsey: My mom was born in Texas, but grew up over the border in Waurika, Okla. As a teenager she wanted to get out, and her brother-in-law, who had all the concessions for jukeboxes and peanut machines in Waurika, emptied them out and gave her the change. She used the money and ran away to Dallas, where she modeled for Neiman Marcus, until her mother came and got her and then moved the family to California.
Didn't you also live in Marfa for a time?
Yes. My writing career kind of started in Marfa when I wrote about a conference of architects that was being held at the Chinati Foundation. Herzog and de Meuron were there, Frank Gehry and Claes Oldenburg. I wrote it as a Talk of the Town piece for the New Yorker, but they killed it. Then I met Dave Eggers in a bar, and he told me to write it for McSweeney's, which was originally founded to publish stories that were killed by other magazines.
How old were you when you started writing this memoir?
I started in 1998 when I was 28. I'd been working on a novel for six years, but hadn't been able to get anybody to take an interest in it, and was doing some book reviewing. Actually, the first book I reviewed was Duncan McLean's "Lone Star Swing" — I just loved the book, it was so lighthearted, Scottish, funny, well-researched and he really knew his stuff. But my wife had heard me talking endlessly about these weird reform-style schools I had gone to and she suggested writing about them. I started interviewing people who I'd gone to school with and my agent David McCormick . . .
There's another Texas connection...
Yes, he's a former editor at Texas Monthly. He sold the book as a memoir. I did a lot of interviewing for this book, including a couple of people who worked for my dad and ended up in Seguin. If I think about it, this is a perfectly legitimate Texas book.
Was it awkward to interview people you knew in high school?
It's weird because you're not really friends with them anymore. That said, people really do like to talk about their past. Most of the people I write about from that time don't come across very well, but a lot of people have gotten in touch with me and said they really liked the book. People are endlessly surprising.
Your father died, but your mother and stepmother are alive and well-known in San Francisco. How did they react to the book?
The newspapers in San Francisco had a field day. It was as if it were the sauciest thing that anybody has written in years. That provoked everyone to start behaving badly. I weirdly thought that my stepmother Dede would enjoy it and revel in the image I portrayed of her. But she gave an interview to The New York Times that couldn't have been more like the way she was portrayed in the book. If you want to take the high road, that isn't the way to do it at all. My mom, who was in some ways (ticked) off about the things that I wrote, was very stateswomanly about it.
You now have a 2-year-old son. How does your crazy childhood affect your parenting style?
I try to take more cues from him. I was buffeted around a lot as a child. For example, Mom would take me out to a fashion show. While that was a fun day for her, and somewhat for me, it was totally part of her program.
Last year, some critics compared your memoir to James Frey's. This was before his downfall. As it turns out, you actually spent more time in jail than Frey did. He only spent three hours in jail.
Yes, I spent two whole nights in jail, though that first night started at 4 in the morning. Actually, you may not find it surprising, but I think there are a lot of writers out there who've spent more time in jail than James Frey did.
Sean Wilsey gives an inside look into his memoir, talks about his Texas ties.
By Edward Nawotka
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Sunday, April 30, 2006
I had the type of childhood — one that included eight years of Catholic military school — that prompts people to say after too much wine at dinner parties, "You should write about that!" I think, recklessly, "Yeah!"
Then I read a book like Sean Wilsey's "Oh the Glory of It All," a voluminous tell-all about growing up the scion of a San Francisco butter magnate who tooled around in helicopters and a narcissistic gossip-columnist mother. And it sobers me.
Wilsey's book is, in a word, Joycean. Generation X Joycean: Portrait of the Artist as a Young, Rich Screw-up. Just like Joyce's coming-of-age masterpiece, Wilsey's book features a long, harrowing stint at an elitist boarding school, St. Mark's in Southborough, Mass., and a God-like figure of dread: his wicked stepmother Dede, whom he finds himself fantasizing about sexually.
It's creepy and compelling and oh so tantalizing.
An editor-at-large for McSweeney's literary magazine, Wilsey is also co-editor of the forthcoming essay collection "The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup" (which includes a contribution about Ecuador from Austin's Jake Silverstein). He comes to town this week as part of the publicity tour for the paperback edition of "Oh the Glory of It All."
Wilsey spoke with us by phone from his home in New York City.
Austin American-Statesman: Your memoir is mostly about San Francisco, but don't you also have some strong Texas connections?
Sean Wilsey: My mom was born in Texas, but grew up over the border in Waurika, Okla. As a teenager she wanted to get out, and her brother-in-law, who had all the concessions for jukeboxes and peanut machines in Waurika, emptied them out and gave her the change. She used the money and ran away to Dallas, where she modeled for Neiman Marcus, until her mother came and got her and then moved the family to California.
Didn't you also live in Marfa for a time?
Yes. My writing career kind of started in Marfa when I wrote about a conference of architects that was being held at the Chinati Foundation. Herzog and de Meuron were there, Frank Gehry and Claes Oldenburg. I wrote it as a Talk of the Town piece for the New Yorker, but they killed it. Then I met Dave Eggers in a bar, and he told me to write it for McSweeney's, which was originally founded to publish stories that were killed by other magazines.
How old were you when you started writing this memoir?
I started in 1998 when I was 28. I'd been working on a novel for six years, but hadn't been able to get anybody to take an interest in it, and was doing some book reviewing. Actually, the first book I reviewed was Duncan McLean's "Lone Star Swing" — I just loved the book, it was so lighthearted, Scottish, funny, well-researched and he really knew his stuff. But my wife had heard me talking endlessly about these weird reform-style schools I had gone to and she suggested writing about them. I started interviewing people who I'd gone to school with and my agent David McCormick . . .
There's another Texas connection...
Yes, he's a former editor at Texas Monthly. He sold the book as a memoir. I did a lot of interviewing for this book, including a couple of people who worked for my dad and ended up in Seguin. If I think about it, this is a perfectly legitimate Texas book.
Was it awkward to interview people you knew in high school?
It's weird because you're not really friends with them anymore. That said, people really do like to talk about their past. Most of the people I write about from that time don't come across very well, but a lot of people have gotten in touch with me and said they really liked the book. People are endlessly surprising.
Your father died, but your mother and stepmother are alive and well-known in San Francisco. How did they react to the book?
The newspapers in San Francisco had a field day. It was as if it were the sauciest thing that anybody has written in years. That provoked everyone to start behaving badly. I weirdly thought that my stepmother Dede would enjoy it and revel in the image I portrayed of her. But she gave an interview to The New York Times that couldn't have been more like the way she was portrayed in the book. If you want to take the high road, that isn't the way to do it at all. My mom, who was in some ways (ticked) off about the things that I wrote, was very stateswomanly about it.
You now have a 2-year-old son. How does your crazy childhood affect your parenting style?
I try to take more cues from him. I was buffeted around a lot as a child. For example, Mom would take me out to a fashion show. While that was a fun day for her, and somewhat for me, it was totally part of her program.
Last year, some critics compared your memoir to James Frey's. This was before his downfall. As it turns out, you actually spent more time in jail than Frey did. He only spent three hours in jail.
Yes, I spent two whole nights in jail, though that first night started at 4 in the morning. Actually, you may not find it surprising, but I think there are a lot of writers out there who've spent more time in jail than James Frey did.
Batali's Clogs, Couch Potatoes Hit Shelves: May Book Preview
Batali's Clogs, Couch Potatoes Hit Shelves: May Book Preview
May 1 (Bloomberg) -- Orange clogs, lazy loafers and places named Absurdistan and Kutar vie with Philip Roth and Anne Tyler for a spot near your reading lamp in May. Here's a selection of new books this month.
Nonfiction
``The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast'' by Douglas Brinkley (Morrow): The Tulane University professor assesses the aftermath of the hurricane that devastated 150 miles of Gulf Coast in just five hours.
``The Medici Conspiracy: The Illicit Journey of Looted Antiquities -- From Italy's Tomb Raiders to the World's Greatest Museums'' by Peter Watson and Cecilia Todeschini (PublicAffairs): The story of Giacomo Medici, the head of a crime syndicate that brokered hundreds of millions of dollars of illicit Italian antiquities, many of which ended up at Sotheby's and some of the world's top museums.
``Confessions of a Municipal Bond Salesman'' by Jim Lebenthal (Wiley): The chairman emeritus and former president of Lebenthal & Co. reflects on his long career, which saw him morph from Hollywood reporter to Wall Street legend. He offers tips on how to make it big in municipal-bond sales and life.
``Guanxi (The Art of Relationships): Microsoft, China, and Bill Gates's Plan to Win the Road Ahead'' by Robert Buderi and Gregory T. Huang (Simon & Schuster): A behind-the-scenes look into Microsoft's Asian Research Center in Beijing and how globalization has affected the world's biggest software manufacturer.
``Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present'' by Peter Hessler (HarperCollins): Vignettes by the New Yorker's Beijing correspondent and author of ``River Town'' eloquently depict the rapid social changes taking place among China's 1.2 billion budding capitalists.
``Reporting: Writings from the New Yorker'' by David Remnick (Knopf): The editor-in-chief of the New Yorker collects some of profiles he has written for the magazine in the past 15 years, many focusing on Russian and Israeli politicians and fellow writers.
``The Mighty & the Almighty: Reflections on America, God, and World Affairs'' by Madeleine Albright. (HarperCollins): President Clinton's secretary of state argues that religion has now become the single most important issue threatening global stability.
``Strange Piece of Paradise: A Return to the American West to Investigate My Attempted Murder -- and Solve the Riddle of Myself'' by Terri Jentz (Farrar, Straus & Giroux): In this chilling true-crime story, Jentz recalls how in 1977 an unknown man tried to kill her and a friend while they were camping in Oregon, driving a truck over their tent and then assaulting them with an ax. Years later she tries to find out why.
``Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home'' by Nando Parrado (Crown): A survivor of the 1972 plane crash made infamous by the book ``Alive'' recounts how he has coped with the memory of the crash and the decision to resort to cannibalism, which kept him and other survivors alive.
``Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America'' by Tom Lutz (Farrar, Straus & Giroux): A discussion of the work ethic or lack thereof throughout U.S. history, including the couch potato, New York bohemians and Lutz's own good-for-nothing son.
``Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community and War'' by Nathaniel Philbrick (Viking): The National Book Award-winning author of ``In the Heart of the Sea'' revisits the pilgrims' uncertain sea voyage and the vulnerable early days of the Plymouth colony.
``Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different'' by Gordon S. Wood (Penguin): In eight profiles, the respected Brown University historian tries to distill the qualities that made the founding fathers, including Washington, Paine and Burr, such effective leaders.
``Possible Side Effects: True Stories'' by Augusten Burroughs (St. Martin's): These essayistic flights of fancy, from the author of the bestseller ``Running With Scissors,'' cover topics from incontinent pets to eBay addiction.
``The One That Got Away: A Memoir'' by Howell Raines (Scribner): The ousted executive editor of the New York Times blamed for the Jayson Blair scandal follows up his bestseller ``Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis'' with this disquisition on life lessons learned at the Times and at the end of a fishing pole.
``Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany'' by Bill Buford (Knopf): The former New Yorker fiction editor documents his three-year stint in the kitchen with chef Mario Batali of the orange clogs.
``What to Eat: An Aisle-by-Aisle Guide to Savvy Food Choices and Good Eating'' by Marion Nestle (North Point Press): The popular food-industry analyst and New York University professor provides an authoritative guide on how to avoid getting duped into stuffing your supermarket cart with junk food masquerading as nutritious edibles.
Fiction
``Absurdistan'' by Gary Shteyngart (Random House): The author of ``The Russian Debutante's Handbook'' returns with a hilarious farce about 21st-century greed in which a would-be Russian rap impresario finds himself appointed minister of multicultural affairs in the tiny, oil-rich nation of Absurdistan.
``Everyman'' by Philip Roth (Houghton Mifflin): The unnamed, self-reflective, thrice-divorced septuagenarian male narrator looks back on his life and finds it wanting. He won't please the new readers Roth won with 2004's alt-history thriller ``The Plot Against America,'' but he is the latest in a long line of Roth's bitter, all-too-human, sex-obsessed antiheroes that extends from Portnoy to Zuckerman.
``Digging to America'' by Anne Tyler (Knopf): Two couples, the white-bread suburban Donaldsons and the Iranian Yazdans, meet at the Baltimore airport while waiting to pick up the Korean babies each family will adopt. The two families soon grow intertwined in this passionate meditation on what it means to be and to become American.
``Theft: A Love Story'' by Peter Carey (Knopf): A two-time winner of the Booker Prize, Carey remains in top form with this tale of two Australians seduced into running an art-world scam by the sexy, beguiling daughter-in-law of a famous 20th-century painter.
``The Whole World Over'' by Julia Glass (Pantheon): Characters from Glass's National Book Award-winning ``Three Junes'' reappear in this multilayered romantic saga, in which a Manhattan pastry chef in a troubled marriage moves her 4-year-old son to New Mexico to cook for the charismatic, conservative governor.
``The Foreign Correspondent'' by Alan Furst (Random House): Furst continues his exceptional series of World War II-era thrillers with this yarn about Carlo Weisz, a Reuters reporter who takes control of an underground newspaper in Paris and becomes a target of Mussolini's secret police, Stalin's NKVD and Hitler's Gestapo.
``The Stolen Child'' by Keith Donohue (Doubleday): In this virtuosic debut novel inspired by a Yeats poem of the same name, Henry Day is 7 years old when fairies switch him with the son of a German piano teacher. If the two children can find each other, they might get their lives back.
``Killer Instinct'' by Joseph Finder (St. Martin's): Thirty- year-old salesman Jason Steadman has stalled in his career at a Boston consumer-electronics company, when his new best friend, a troubled Iraqi war vet working in security, starts offering unwelcome assistance up the corporate ladder.
``Moonlight Hotel'' by Scott Anderson (Doubleday): U.S. diplomat David Richards has what he thinks is a cushy job in the fictional Middle Eastern kingdom of Kutar. When rebels try to overthrow of the government, he is soon trapped in a dilapidated resort hotel with the few remaining expatriates and forced to fight for his life.
``The Possibility of an Island'' by Michel Houellebecq (Knopf): The provocative French writer's nihilistic magnum opus concerns a Parisian shock-jock who, after his marriage disintegrates, joins a cult promoting free love and cloning as a path to immortality. The chorus of soulless ``neohuman'' descendants narrating the novel proves his plan worked, at least somewhat.
May 1 (Bloomberg) -- Orange clogs, lazy loafers and places named Absurdistan and Kutar vie with Philip Roth and Anne Tyler for a spot near your reading lamp in May. Here's a selection of new books this month.
Nonfiction
``The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast'' by Douglas Brinkley (Morrow): The Tulane University professor assesses the aftermath of the hurricane that devastated 150 miles of Gulf Coast in just five hours.
``The Medici Conspiracy: The Illicit Journey of Looted Antiquities -- From Italy's Tomb Raiders to the World's Greatest Museums'' by Peter Watson and Cecilia Todeschini (PublicAffairs): The story of Giacomo Medici, the head of a crime syndicate that brokered hundreds of millions of dollars of illicit Italian antiquities, many of which ended up at Sotheby's and some of the world's top museums.
``Confessions of a Municipal Bond Salesman'' by Jim Lebenthal (Wiley): The chairman emeritus and former president of Lebenthal & Co. reflects on his long career, which saw him morph from Hollywood reporter to Wall Street legend. He offers tips on how to make it big in municipal-bond sales and life.
``Guanxi (The Art of Relationships): Microsoft, China, and Bill Gates's Plan to Win the Road Ahead'' by Robert Buderi and Gregory T. Huang (Simon & Schuster): A behind-the-scenes look into Microsoft's Asian Research Center in Beijing and how globalization has affected the world's biggest software manufacturer.
``Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present'' by Peter Hessler (HarperCollins): Vignettes by the New Yorker's Beijing correspondent and author of ``River Town'' eloquently depict the rapid social changes taking place among China's 1.2 billion budding capitalists.
``Reporting: Writings from the New Yorker'' by David Remnick (Knopf): The editor-in-chief of the New Yorker collects some of profiles he has written for the magazine in the past 15 years, many focusing on Russian and Israeli politicians and fellow writers.
``The Mighty & the Almighty: Reflections on America, God, and World Affairs'' by Madeleine Albright. (HarperCollins): President Clinton's secretary of state argues that religion has now become the single most important issue threatening global stability.
``Strange Piece of Paradise: A Return to the American West to Investigate My Attempted Murder -- and Solve the Riddle of Myself'' by Terri Jentz (Farrar, Straus & Giroux): In this chilling true-crime story, Jentz recalls how in 1977 an unknown man tried to kill her and a friend while they were camping in Oregon, driving a truck over their tent and then assaulting them with an ax. Years later she tries to find out why.
``Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home'' by Nando Parrado (Crown): A survivor of the 1972 plane crash made infamous by the book ``Alive'' recounts how he has coped with the memory of the crash and the decision to resort to cannibalism, which kept him and other survivors alive.
``Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America'' by Tom Lutz (Farrar, Straus & Giroux): A discussion of the work ethic or lack thereof throughout U.S. history, including the couch potato, New York bohemians and Lutz's own good-for-nothing son.
``Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community and War'' by Nathaniel Philbrick (Viking): The National Book Award-winning author of ``In the Heart of the Sea'' revisits the pilgrims' uncertain sea voyage and the vulnerable early days of the Plymouth colony.
``Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different'' by Gordon S. Wood (Penguin): In eight profiles, the respected Brown University historian tries to distill the qualities that made the founding fathers, including Washington, Paine and Burr, such effective leaders.
``Possible Side Effects: True Stories'' by Augusten Burroughs (St. Martin's): These essayistic flights of fancy, from the author of the bestseller ``Running With Scissors,'' cover topics from incontinent pets to eBay addiction.
``The One That Got Away: A Memoir'' by Howell Raines (Scribner): The ousted executive editor of the New York Times blamed for the Jayson Blair scandal follows up his bestseller ``Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis'' with this disquisition on life lessons learned at the Times and at the end of a fishing pole.
``Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany'' by Bill Buford (Knopf): The former New Yorker fiction editor documents his three-year stint in the kitchen with chef Mario Batali of the orange clogs.
``What to Eat: An Aisle-by-Aisle Guide to Savvy Food Choices and Good Eating'' by Marion Nestle (North Point Press): The popular food-industry analyst and New York University professor provides an authoritative guide on how to avoid getting duped into stuffing your supermarket cart with junk food masquerading as nutritious edibles.
Fiction
``Absurdistan'' by Gary Shteyngart (Random House): The author of ``The Russian Debutante's Handbook'' returns with a hilarious farce about 21st-century greed in which a would-be Russian rap impresario finds himself appointed minister of multicultural affairs in the tiny, oil-rich nation of Absurdistan.
``Everyman'' by Philip Roth (Houghton Mifflin): The unnamed, self-reflective, thrice-divorced septuagenarian male narrator looks back on his life and finds it wanting. He won't please the new readers Roth won with 2004's alt-history thriller ``The Plot Against America,'' but he is the latest in a long line of Roth's bitter, all-too-human, sex-obsessed antiheroes that extends from Portnoy to Zuckerman.
``Digging to America'' by Anne Tyler (Knopf): Two couples, the white-bread suburban Donaldsons and the Iranian Yazdans, meet at the Baltimore airport while waiting to pick up the Korean babies each family will adopt. The two families soon grow intertwined in this passionate meditation on what it means to be and to become American.
``Theft: A Love Story'' by Peter Carey (Knopf): A two-time winner of the Booker Prize, Carey remains in top form with this tale of two Australians seduced into running an art-world scam by the sexy, beguiling daughter-in-law of a famous 20th-century painter.
``The Whole World Over'' by Julia Glass (Pantheon): Characters from Glass's National Book Award-winning ``Three Junes'' reappear in this multilayered romantic saga, in which a Manhattan pastry chef in a troubled marriage moves her 4-year-old son to New Mexico to cook for the charismatic, conservative governor.
``The Foreign Correspondent'' by Alan Furst (Random House): Furst continues his exceptional series of World War II-era thrillers with this yarn about Carlo Weisz, a Reuters reporter who takes control of an underground newspaper in Paris and becomes a target of Mussolini's secret police, Stalin's NKVD and Hitler's Gestapo.
``The Stolen Child'' by Keith Donohue (Doubleday): In this virtuosic debut novel inspired by a Yeats poem of the same name, Henry Day is 7 years old when fairies switch him with the son of a German piano teacher. If the two children can find each other, they might get their lives back.
``Killer Instinct'' by Joseph Finder (St. Martin's): Thirty- year-old salesman Jason Steadman has stalled in his career at a Boston consumer-electronics company, when his new best friend, a troubled Iraqi war vet working in security, starts offering unwelcome assistance up the corporate ladder.
``Moonlight Hotel'' by Scott Anderson (Doubleday): U.S. diplomat David Richards has what he thinks is a cushy job in the fictional Middle Eastern kingdom of Kutar. When rebels try to overthrow of the government, he is soon trapped in a dilapidated resort hotel with the few remaining expatriates and forced to fight for his life.
``The Possibility of an Island'' by Michel Houellebecq (Knopf): The provocative French writer's nihilistic magnum opus concerns a Parisian shock-jock who, after his marriage disintegrates, joins a cult promoting free love and cloning as a path to immortality. The chorus of soulless ``neohuman'' descendants narrating the novel proves his plan worked, at least somewhat.
Monday, April 10, 2006
Poker, Paralegals and Michael Eisner Star in April Paperbacks
Poker, Paralegals and Michael Eisner Star in April Paperbacks
April 10 (Bloomberg) -- Professional poker players, paralegals, Parisians, Persians and Michael Eisner all star in April's new paperbacks. Here is our list of original paperbacks and reprints.
Original Fiction
``The Prop'' by Pete Hautman (Simon & Schuster): Peeky Kane, a professional poker player, tracks down a crew of murderous clown-masked thieves who stole millions from an Indian casino in Arizona.
``Family and Other Accidents'' by Shari Goldhagen (Broadway): This eloquent debut novel tells the tale of two brothers: Jack Reed, who has returned to Cleveland to look after his late father's law firm and its bevy of paralegals, and his younger brother Connor, who wants to get out of Ohio as fast a possible.
``The Nimrod Flipout: Stories'' by Etgar Keret (Farrar, Straus & Giroux): This Israeli writer's surreal short stories portray a motley assortment of oddballs, including a cynical, talking Middle Eastern fish and a man whose girlfriend morphs each night into a overweight soccer thug.
``The Death of Achilles'' by Boris Akunin (Random House): The fourth of Akunin's series of Russian mysteries finds 19th- century diplomat-detective Erast Fandorin holed up in a Moscow hotel and investigating the murder of a war hero.
``Best of Tin House: Stories'' (Tin House Books): These 27 stories, culled from the past four years of the esteemed New York literary magazine Tin House, include selections by Denis Johnson, Deborah Eisenberg and Anthony Swofford.
Notable Fiction Reprints
``The DaVinci Code'' by Dan Brown (Anchor): If you are one of the last people on this planet who haven't yet read Brown's fanciful mystery about Opus Dei and the significance of Mona Lisa's smile, your time is now.
``Saturday'' by Ian McEwan (Vintage): Henry Perowne, a wealthy London neurosurgeon on his way to play squash, clips the rear-view mirror of a passing BMW. When the deranged lout behind the wheel seeks revenge, Perowne makes a personal acquaintance with terror.
``Misfortune'' by Wesley Stace (Little, Brown): A meta-sized comedy in the tradition of Charles Dickens, about a foundling rescued from a London garbage heap in 1820 by the richest man in England, and written by the musician otherwise known as John Wesley Harding.
``Never Let Me Go'' by Kazuo Ishiguro (Vintage): This finalist for last year's Booker Prize tells the chilling story of Kathy, Ruth and Tommy, who met while students at an exclusive English boarding school and discover they are clones being bred for an insidious purpose.
``Before the Frost'' by Henning Mankell (Vintage/Black Lizard): The 10th in this thinking man's mystery series from the Swedish master features detective Kurt Wallander, joined by his daughter Linda, a newly minted police officer, in a hunt for a deadly religious psychopath.
``Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close'' by Jonathan Safran Foer (Mariner): The follow-up to the author's acclaimed ``Everything Is Illuminated'' describes the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks through the eyes of a 9-year-old New Yorker whose father died in the World Trade Center.
``The Hummingbird's Daughter'' by Luis Alberto Urrea (Back Bay): The 2006 Kiriyama Prize for fiction -- a prize usually reserved for Asian books -- went to this 500- page Latino epic about a Mexican peasant woman who becomes a Catholic revolutionary.
``My Uncle Napoleon'' by Iraj Pezeshkzad (Modern Library): This surprisingly funny novel, beloved in Iran, describes a paranoid modern-day Persian society where all earthly troubles are blamed on the British.
``The Mermaid Chair'' by Sue Monk Kidd (Penguin): This romantic novel about a love triangle between a woman, her husband and a monk, follows Monk's previous book, ``The Secret Life of Bees,'' which has sold an astonishing 3 million copies since it was published in 2002.
``A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian'' by Marina Lewycka (Penguin): Lewycka's touching comedy-of-errors about an exiled Ukrainian family living in the U.K., whose elderly patriarch intends to marry a voluptuous gold digger.
Nonfiction
``Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise'' by Ruth Reichl (Penguin): The editor of Gourmet and former New York Times food critic reveals the myriad of alternate identities that allowed her to dine incognito at restaurants whose fortunes depended on her palette.
``Does Anything Eat Wasps?'' (Free Press): A compendium of articles from the U.K.'s New Scientist magazine promises 101 ``unsettling, witty answers to questions you never thought you wanted to ask,'' such as ``Does beheading hurt?'' and ``Why do people have eyebrows?''
``The Secret Way to War: The Downing Street Memo and the Iraq War's Buried History'' by Mark Danner (New York Review Books): This investigation into collaboration between the Bush and Blair administrations in the planning of the 2003 invasion of Iraq offers further proof clandestine plans were prepared for the war as early as 2002.
``Confidence: How Winning Streaks & Losing Streaks Begin & End'' by Rosabeth Moss Kanter (Three Rivers): Kanter's theoretical look at how winners become winners posits that supreme self-confidence is the ultimate asset in any business situation.
``The Men Who Stare at Goats'' by Jon Ronson (Simon & Schuster): This U.K. journalist's fascinating investigation into the occult practices of the U.S. military uncovers a program that sought to train soldiers how to walk through walls and kill using only their eyes.
``What We Believe But Cannot Prove: Science in the Age of Certainty'' edited by John Brockman (HarperPerennial): More than 100 scientists and thinkers offer brief essays about what their gut tells them is true -- such as the idea that the universe is infinite -- though they have no evidence beyond their own hunches.
``John James Audubon: The Making of an American'' by Richard Rhodes (Vintage): This vivid new biography of the writer and illustrator of ``Birds of America'' by Rhodes, a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winner, is perfect vacation reading for ``twitchers'' everywhere.
``DisneyWar'' by James B. Stewart (Simon & Schuster): A magisterial 600-page business chronicle charting the Shakespearean rise and fall of former Chief Executive Officer Michael Eisner and his battles with other high-maintenance entertainment personalities including Jeffrey Katzenberg and Michael Ovitz.
``A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future'' by Daniel Pink (Riverhead): The author of ``Free Agent Nation'' predicts that most jobs requiring left-brain thinking, such as accounting, will be outsourced to India and China.
``The Last True Story I'll Ever Tell: An Accidental Soldier's Account of the War in Iraq'' by John Crawford (Riverhead): Crawford was a weekend warrior in National Guard and a college senior when he was sent to Iraq. His story of mind- numbing patrols punctuated by moments of terror reflects the ordeal of thousands of young soldiers.
``Finding George Orwell in Burma'' by Emma Larkin (Penguin): Larkin documents a year of traveling through the authoritarian police state of Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, while tracing the life and legend of writer George Orwell, who served there as an administrator for the British Empire.
``Countdown to Crisis: The Coming Nuclear Showdown With Iran'' by Kenneth R. Timmerman (Three Rivers): Timmerman offers up a blow-by-blow account of the development of Iran's nuclear weapons program and argues that the Islamic Republic of Iran is preparing for and would welcome a war with the United States.
``Phaic Tan'' by Santo Cilauro, Tom Gleisner and Rob Sitch (Chronicle): The trio who brought you the amusing travel-guide parody ``Molvania'' follow up with another bogus guide to a nonexistent country, this one in Southeast Asia.
``We'll Always Have Paris: Sex and Love in the City of Light'' by John Baxter (HarperPerennial): Yet another paean to the world's favorite city, this time by a globe-trotting Australian film critic who recounts his lifelong love affair with his wife and the French capital.
April 10 (Bloomberg) -- Professional poker players, paralegals, Parisians, Persians and Michael Eisner all star in April's new paperbacks. Here is our list of original paperbacks and reprints.
Original Fiction
``The Prop'' by Pete Hautman (Simon & Schuster): Peeky Kane, a professional poker player, tracks down a crew of murderous clown-masked thieves who stole millions from an Indian casino in Arizona.
``Family and Other Accidents'' by Shari Goldhagen (Broadway): This eloquent debut novel tells the tale of two brothers: Jack Reed, who has returned to Cleveland to look after his late father's law firm and its bevy of paralegals, and his younger brother Connor, who wants to get out of Ohio as fast a possible.
``The Nimrod Flipout: Stories'' by Etgar Keret (Farrar, Straus & Giroux): This Israeli writer's surreal short stories portray a motley assortment of oddballs, including a cynical, talking Middle Eastern fish and a man whose girlfriend morphs each night into a overweight soccer thug.
``The Death of Achilles'' by Boris Akunin (Random House): The fourth of Akunin's series of Russian mysteries finds 19th- century diplomat-detective Erast Fandorin holed up in a Moscow hotel and investigating the murder of a war hero.
``Best of Tin House: Stories'' (Tin House Books): These 27 stories, culled from the past four years of the esteemed New York literary magazine Tin House, include selections by Denis Johnson, Deborah Eisenberg and Anthony Swofford.
Notable Fiction Reprints
``The DaVinci Code'' by Dan Brown (Anchor): If you are one of the last people on this planet who haven't yet read Brown's fanciful mystery about Opus Dei and the significance of Mona Lisa's smile, your time is now.
``Saturday'' by Ian McEwan (Vintage): Henry Perowne, a wealthy London neurosurgeon on his way to play squash, clips the rear-view mirror of a passing BMW. When the deranged lout behind the wheel seeks revenge, Perowne makes a personal acquaintance with terror.
``Misfortune'' by Wesley Stace (Little, Brown): A meta-sized comedy in the tradition of Charles Dickens, about a foundling rescued from a London garbage heap in 1820 by the richest man in England, and written by the musician otherwise known as John Wesley Harding.
``Never Let Me Go'' by Kazuo Ishiguro (Vintage): This finalist for last year's Booker Prize tells the chilling story of Kathy, Ruth and Tommy, who met while students at an exclusive English boarding school and discover they are clones being bred for an insidious purpose.
``Before the Frost'' by Henning Mankell (Vintage/Black Lizard): The 10th in this thinking man's mystery series from the Swedish master features detective Kurt Wallander, joined by his daughter Linda, a newly minted police officer, in a hunt for a deadly religious psychopath.
``Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close'' by Jonathan Safran Foer (Mariner): The follow-up to the author's acclaimed ``Everything Is Illuminated'' describes the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks through the eyes of a 9-year-old New Yorker whose father died in the World Trade Center.
``The Hummingbird's Daughter'' by Luis Alberto Urrea (Back Bay): The 2006 Kiriyama Prize for fiction -- a prize usually reserved for Asian books -- went to this 500- page Latino epic about a Mexican peasant woman who becomes a Catholic revolutionary.
``My Uncle Napoleon'' by Iraj Pezeshkzad (Modern Library): This surprisingly funny novel, beloved in Iran, describes a paranoid modern-day Persian society where all earthly troubles are blamed on the British.
``The Mermaid Chair'' by Sue Monk Kidd (Penguin): This romantic novel about a love triangle between a woman, her husband and a monk, follows Monk's previous book, ``The Secret Life of Bees,'' which has sold an astonishing 3 million copies since it was published in 2002.
``A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian'' by Marina Lewycka (Penguin): Lewycka's touching comedy-of-errors about an exiled Ukrainian family living in the U.K., whose elderly patriarch intends to marry a voluptuous gold digger.
Nonfiction
``Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise'' by Ruth Reichl (Penguin): The editor of Gourmet and former New York Times food critic reveals the myriad of alternate identities that allowed her to dine incognito at restaurants whose fortunes depended on her palette.
``Does Anything Eat Wasps?'' (Free Press): A compendium of articles from the U.K.'s New Scientist magazine promises 101 ``unsettling, witty answers to questions you never thought you wanted to ask,'' such as ``Does beheading hurt?'' and ``Why do people have eyebrows?''
``The Secret Way to War: The Downing Street Memo and the Iraq War's Buried History'' by Mark Danner (New York Review Books): This investigation into collaboration between the Bush and Blair administrations in the planning of the 2003 invasion of Iraq offers further proof clandestine plans were prepared for the war as early as 2002.
``Confidence: How Winning Streaks & Losing Streaks Begin & End'' by Rosabeth Moss Kanter (Three Rivers): Kanter's theoretical look at how winners become winners posits that supreme self-confidence is the ultimate asset in any business situation.
``The Men Who Stare at Goats'' by Jon Ronson (Simon & Schuster): This U.K. journalist's fascinating investigation into the occult practices of the U.S. military uncovers a program that sought to train soldiers how to walk through walls and kill using only their eyes.
``What We Believe But Cannot Prove: Science in the Age of Certainty'' edited by John Brockman (HarperPerennial): More than 100 scientists and thinkers offer brief essays about what their gut tells them is true -- such as the idea that the universe is infinite -- though they have no evidence beyond their own hunches.
``John James Audubon: The Making of an American'' by Richard Rhodes (Vintage): This vivid new biography of the writer and illustrator of ``Birds of America'' by Rhodes, a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winner, is perfect vacation reading for ``twitchers'' everywhere.
``DisneyWar'' by James B. Stewart (Simon & Schuster): A magisterial 600-page business chronicle charting the Shakespearean rise and fall of former Chief Executive Officer Michael Eisner and his battles with other high-maintenance entertainment personalities including Jeffrey Katzenberg and Michael Ovitz.
``A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future'' by Daniel Pink (Riverhead): The author of ``Free Agent Nation'' predicts that most jobs requiring left-brain thinking, such as accounting, will be outsourced to India and China.
``The Last True Story I'll Ever Tell: An Accidental Soldier's Account of the War in Iraq'' by John Crawford (Riverhead): Crawford was a weekend warrior in National Guard and a college senior when he was sent to Iraq. His story of mind- numbing patrols punctuated by moments of terror reflects the ordeal of thousands of young soldiers.
``Finding George Orwell in Burma'' by Emma Larkin (Penguin): Larkin documents a year of traveling through the authoritarian police state of Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, while tracing the life and legend of writer George Orwell, who served there as an administrator for the British Empire.
``Countdown to Crisis: The Coming Nuclear Showdown With Iran'' by Kenneth R. Timmerman (Three Rivers): Timmerman offers up a blow-by-blow account of the development of Iran's nuclear weapons program and argues that the Islamic Republic of Iran is preparing for and would welcome a war with the United States.
``Phaic Tan'' by Santo Cilauro, Tom Gleisner and Rob Sitch (Chronicle): The trio who brought you the amusing travel-guide parody ``Molvania'' follow up with another bogus guide to a nonexistent country, this one in Southeast Asia.
``We'll Always Have Paris: Sex and Love in the City of Light'' by John Baxter (HarperPerennial): Yet another paean to the world's favorite city, this time by a globe-trotting Australian film critic who recounts his lifelong love affair with his wife and the French capital.
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
As Glaciers Melt and Oceans Rise, Earthlings Yawn and Consume
As Glaciers Melt and Oceans Rise, Earthlings Yawn and Consume
April 4 (Bloomberg) -- ``Field Notes From a Catastrophe'' (Bloomsbury, 210 pages, $22.95) expands a three-part series Elizabeth Kolbert wrote for the New Yorker magazine on the topic of global warming and degradation.
She visits Shishmaref, Alaska, where melting ice has forced Eskimos to use boats instead of dogsleds for some seasonal hunting. On a visit to the Dutch town of Maasbommel, contractors show her ``amphibious homes'' that can float when the North Sea rises and floods canals.
The Earth is warming. Does it really matter if this has happened before or that the melt will take centuries? The news is not good when 100,000-year-old glaciers in Greenland are slowly sliding into the sea. Let's pay attention.
Kolbert, whose book is subtitled ``Man, Nature, and Climate Change'' is sober and convincing and there is little good news. Changing weather patterns will threaten agriculture and food supplies. Rising, warmer seas will spawn more storms of greater intensity and flood more coastal areas, as surely as Hurricane Katrina swamped New Orleans.
The catalyst is well known: methane and carbon-dioxide emissions caused by everything from fermenting rice paddies in Asia to Airbus jetliners crossing Kansas. The gas traps heat in the atmosphere, preventing it from radiating back into space.
``Humans aren't the first species to alter the atmosphere,'' she says in a not very consoling passage. ``That distinction belongs to early bacteria, which, some two billion years ago, invented photosynthesis.''
Kolbert finds hope in places like Burlington, Vermont, where the local electric company gets nearly half its power from renewable sources, including a 50-megawatt power plant that runs off wood chips. To start, she wants the U.S. to sign the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, mandating emissions controls.
Flannery's Plea
Australian scientist Tim Flannery marshals much of the same data in his fiercely polemical ``The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth'' (Atlantic Monthly, 357 pages, $24; Allen Lane, 20 pounds). It's essentially an attack on gas guzzlers and a plea for the use of electric hybrids that cut average carbon-dioxide emissions by about 70 percent. The same ``amount scientists consider is required for the world economy by 2050 in order to stabilize climate change,'' he writes.
``We cannot wait for the problem to be solved for us'' by corporations or governments, he says, insisting that we can switch to ``a carbon-free economy'' by producing our own electricity with solar panels and curtailing our energy consumption. They don't call him ``Calamity Flannery'' in Australia for nothing.
Summit Lost
In ``Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness'' (Riverhead, 247 pages, $23.95), Erik Reece describes how radical strip mining destroyed a forested peak in Appalachia.
Rather than digging tunnels, the company used explosives and bulldozers to shear off the summit of the 1,847-foot (563-meter) mountain to get to a coal seam 100 feet below. A year later, the aptly named Lost Mountain was 450 feet shorter and as barren as a moonscape.
Reece, a professor at the University of Kentucky, challenges the viability of strip mining, which pollutes streams with ``sulfuric acid and heavy metals,'' cracks the foundations of local homes and makes no dent on Appalachia's 33 percent unemployment rate.
``Lost Mountain,'' part of which first appeared in Harper's magazine, indicts coal companies that ``operate with little conscience or constraint.''
The author lays most of the responsibility on U.S. consumers. Much of the coal mined at Lost Mountain went to fuel the coal-fired power plants that ``provide electricity to more than 50 percent of American homes.''
Reece calls our ``failure to understand the energy and employment alternatives'' that would save Appalachia, and in the long run, the Earth, ``more than a moral failure; it is a failure of the imagination.''
April 4 (Bloomberg) -- ``Field Notes From a Catastrophe'' (Bloomsbury, 210 pages, $22.95) expands a three-part series Elizabeth Kolbert wrote for the New Yorker magazine on the topic of global warming and degradation.
She visits Shishmaref, Alaska, where melting ice has forced Eskimos to use boats instead of dogsleds for some seasonal hunting. On a visit to the Dutch town of Maasbommel, contractors show her ``amphibious homes'' that can float when the North Sea rises and floods canals.
The Earth is warming. Does it really matter if this has happened before or that the melt will take centuries? The news is not good when 100,000-year-old glaciers in Greenland are slowly sliding into the sea. Let's pay attention.
Kolbert, whose book is subtitled ``Man, Nature, and Climate Change'' is sober and convincing and there is little good news. Changing weather patterns will threaten agriculture and food supplies. Rising, warmer seas will spawn more storms of greater intensity and flood more coastal areas, as surely as Hurricane Katrina swamped New Orleans.
The catalyst is well known: methane and carbon-dioxide emissions caused by everything from fermenting rice paddies in Asia to Airbus jetliners crossing Kansas. The gas traps heat in the atmosphere, preventing it from radiating back into space.
``Humans aren't the first species to alter the atmosphere,'' she says in a not very consoling passage. ``That distinction belongs to early bacteria, which, some two billion years ago, invented photosynthesis.''
Kolbert finds hope in places like Burlington, Vermont, where the local electric company gets nearly half its power from renewable sources, including a 50-megawatt power plant that runs off wood chips. To start, she wants the U.S. to sign the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, mandating emissions controls.
Flannery's Plea
Australian scientist Tim Flannery marshals much of the same data in his fiercely polemical ``The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth'' (Atlantic Monthly, 357 pages, $24; Allen Lane, 20 pounds). It's essentially an attack on gas guzzlers and a plea for the use of electric hybrids that cut average carbon-dioxide emissions by about 70 percent. The same ``amount scientists consider is required for the world economy by 2050 in order to stabilize climate change,'' he writes.
``We cannot wait for the problem to be solved for us'' by corporations or governments, he says, insisting that we can switch to ``a carbon-free economy'' by producing our own electricity with solar panels and curtailing our energy consumption. They don't call him ``Calamity Flannery'' in Australia for nothing.
Summit Lost
In ``Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness'' (Riverhead, 247 pages, $23.95), Erik Reece describes how radical strip mining destroyed a forested peak in Appalachia.
Rather than digging tunnels, the company used explosives and bulldozers to shear off the summit of the 1,847-foot (563-meter) mountain to get to a coal seam 100 feet below. A year later, the aptly named Lost Mountain was 450 feet shorter and as barren as a moonscape.
Reece, a professor at the University of Kentucky, challenges the viability of strip mining, which pollutes streams with ``sulfuric acid and heavy metals,'' cracks the foundations of local homes and makes no dent on Appalachia's 33 percent unemployment rate.
``Lost Mountain,'' part of which first appeared in Harper's magazine, indicts coal companies that ``operate with little conscience or constraint.''
The author lays most of the responsibility on U.S. consumers. Much of the coal mined at Lost Mountain went to fuel the coal-fired power plants that ``provide electricity to more than 50 percent of American homes.''
Reece calls our ``failure to understand the energy and employment alternatives'' that would save Appalachia, and in the long run, the Earth, ``more than a moral failure; it is a failure of the imagination.''
Friday, March 31, 2006
Schama's Slaves, Clemente, Boston Strangler, Huey: April Books
Schama's Slaves, Clemente, Boston Strangler, Huey: April Books
March 31 (Bloomberg) -- Simon Schama, Stephen Kinzer and Edward Kennedy keep company among April's new books with the Boston Strangler, Huey Long, Caravaggio and a bunch of fundamentalists in a futuristic America.
Nonfiction
``Kingfish: The Reign of Huey P. Long'' by Richard White (Random House). The colorful Long (governor of Louisiana from 1928 to 1930, then senator for five years until he was mysteriously gunned down by a doctor he didn't know) rigged elections, intimidated rivals and called for redistribution of wealth. He still has his fans and probably would get elected today.
``Revolutionary Wealth: How It Will Be Created and How It Will Change Our Lives'' by Alvin Toffler and Heidi Toffler (Knopf). The authors of ``Future Shock'' look forward to ``zeptoseconds'' and ``prosumers'' -- consumers who produce what they need.
``31 Days: The Crisis That Gave Us the Government We Have Today'' by Barry Werth (Doubleday). Not the Florida hanging chad and Supreme Court farce, but the tumultuous period between Richard Nixon's resignation on August 9, 1974, and Gerald Ford's pardon 31 days later.
``A Death in Belmont'' by Sebastian Junger (Norton). The author of ``The Perfect Storm'' takes on the Boston Strangler, who briefly worked in Junger's home in 1963 and even had his picture taken with baby Sebastian and his mom.
``Fast Boat to China: Corporate Flight and the Consequences of Free Trade -- Lessons from Shanghai'' by Andrew Ross (Pantheon). When Ross went to China to investigate outsourcing, he discovered the place was chaotic yet poised to become even more competitive. One consolation: Ross finds most Chinese workers are just as miserable as the average U.S. cube dweller.
``America Back on Track'' by Edward Kennedy (Viking). The senator advocates re-establishing ``a sound energy conservation policy'' and refocusing government spending on education and health care, instead of warfare.
``The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals'' by Michael Pollan (Penguin). The bestselling author of ``The Botany of Desire'' walks into a supermarket and wonders where all the stuff comes from. Curiously, he finishes his often unnerving investigation without turning vegetarian.
``Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family and Fatherland'' by Carmen Callil (Cape). Virago founder Callil goes in search of Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, the Vichy government's commissioner for Jewish affairs, a collaborator who was personally responsible for the deportation of thousands of French Jews.
``Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero'' by David Maraniss (Simon & Schuster). Maraniss has written a sturdy ode to Pittsburgh Pirate Roberto Clemente, the first Latino to enter Cooperstown. He died on New Year's Eve 1972 while delivering aid to Nicaraguan earthquake victims.
``Wall Street Versus America: The Rampant Greed and Dishonesty That Imperil Your Investments'' by Gary Weiss (Portfolio). Former Business Week reporter Weiss sees malfeasance at all levels of the investment chain, from the cold-calling boiler room operators to fee-charging blue chip fund managers.
``Sweet and Low: A Family Story'' by Rich Cohen (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). The author is the disinherited grandson of the short-order cook who created the single-serving sugar packet and later invented Sweet'N Low. Using court documents and oral history, Cohen recounts the bittersweet tale of how his family's Brooklyn business went global, nearly went bust, and slowly tore the family apart.
``Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire'' by Morris Berman (Norton). Berman says the U.S. economy can't help collapsing beneath mounting debt and expensive wars. Meanwhile, suburban consumers are guided to their own demise by a ``seamless propaganda machine'' run by soulless corporations.
``An Ordinary Man: An Autobiography'' by Paul Rusesabagina. (Viking): The hero of the movie ``Hotel Rwanda,'' who sheltered more than 1,200 Tutsis and Hutus in his hotel during the 1994 Rwanda genocide.
``Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change From Hawaii to Iraq'' by Stephen Kinzer (Times Books). How many governments has the United States overthrown? The answer is 14, writes New York Times foreign correspondent Kinzer, in this critical survey of strong-arm American diplomacy. Hawaii was the first; Iraq the last (for now, anyway).
``Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves, and the American Revolution'' by Simon Schama (Ecco). If you were black during the Revolutionary War, which side would you want to win? Schama reveals that tens of thousands of slaves and freedmen supported the British, who offered emancipation if they fought against the Americans. Some were recaptured, some escaped to Nova Scotia, while others fled to Sierra Leone.
``Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America's War With Militant Islam'' by Mark Bowden (Atlantic). The author of ``Black Hawk Down'' reconstructs the harrowing 444 days, starting on Nov. 4, 1979, when 52 Americans were held hostage in the U.S. embassy in Tehran, Iran. Bowden explains events from the point of view of the Iranians, Americans and diplomats caught up in the long showdown.
Fiction
``The Other Side of You'' by Salley Vickers (Fourth Estate). The former psychoanalyst and author of ``Miss Garnet's Angel'' writes about a psychiatrist and his patient, a failed suicide who shares his unusual fascination with death. Set partly in Rome, it also casts a painting by Caravaggio in a key role.
``Challenger Park'' by Stephen Harrigan (Knopf). Space Shuttle astronaut Lucy Kincheloe is floating 240 miles above Earth and traveling 17,500 miles an hour when she learns that the troubles she left behind in Houston, including a sick child and disintegrating marriage, are minor compared with what can go wrong in space.
``The Messiah of Morris Avenue'' by Tony Hendra (Holt). Hendra's latest features crusading journalist Johnny Greco who threatens the hegemony of a futuristic America ruled by right- wing fundamentalists by reporting on the second-coming of Christ in the guise of a lefty rebel named Jay.
``This Book Will Save Your Life'' by A.M. Homes (Viking). Richard Novak is a divorced day trader living in L.A. who learns his house is being swallowed by a giant sink hole. Meanwhile, the city must contend with earthquakes and feral Chihuahuas. A series of odd events lead Novak to reconciliation with both his ex-wife and estranged son.
``Elements of Style'' by Wendy Wasserstein (Knopf). The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, who died in January, finished this ``Sex and the City''-style comedy of manners set in the moneyed milieu of New York's Upper East Side. The cast includes feuding philanthropists, an aging Oscar-winning film director and a kindly pediatrician.
``Black Swan Green'' by David Mitchell (Random House). The British author imagines one year in the life of 13-year-old Jason, living in Worcestershire, England, in 1982. It's far more accessible than his cryptic Booker Prize-nominated novels ``Cloud Atlas'' and ``Number9Dream.''
``The Sand Cafe'' by Neil MacFarquhar (PublicAffairs). The Cairo bureau chief of the New York Times has written a satire of reporting set in Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War. Wire- service reporter Angus Dalziel must try to outwit and outlast better-paid and better-looking TV reporters -- remember the ``Scud Stud'' -- in pursuit of the story.
``Seeing'' by Jose Saramago (Harcourt). This new political fable from the Portuguese Nobel Prize-winner, a sequel to his 1997 novel ``Blindness,'' depicts a national election gone awry. When more than 70 percent of the votes are found blank, the befuddled authorities impose a state of emergency. Saramago may be master of the surreal, but his dense, page-long sentences don't make for easy reading.
``The Lightning Keeper'' by Starling Lawrence (HarperCollins). In Connecticut in 1914, Harriet Bigelow is trying to save her family's iron works from ruin, when a young Balkan inventor comes along and promises to revive her company and revolutionize production of electricity. Equal parts business saga and romance, Lawrence's second novel, a sequel to his first, ``Montenegro'' won praise from reclusive writer Harper Lee.
March 31 (Bloomberg) -- Simon Schama, Stephen Kinzer and Edward Kennedy keep company among April's new books with the Boston Strangler, Huey Long, Caravaggio and a bunch of fundamentalists in a futuristic America.
Nonfiction
``Kingfish: The Reign of Huey P. Long'' by Richard White (Random House). The colorful Long (governor of Louisiana from 1928 to 1930, then senator for five years until he was mysteriously gunned down by a doctor he didn't know) rigged elections, intimidated rivals and called for redistribution of wealth. He still has his fans and probably would get elected today.
``Revolutionary Wealth: How It Will Be Created and How It Will Change Our Lives'' by Alvin Toffler and Heidi Toffler (Knopf). The authors of ``Future Shock'' look forward to ``zeptoseconds'' and ``prosumers'' -- consumers who produce what they need.
``31 Days: The Crisis That Gave Us the Government We Have Today'' by Barry Werth (Doubleday). Not the Florida hanging chad and Supreme Court farce, but the tumultuous period between Richard Nixon's resignation on August 9, 1974, and Gerald Ford's pardon 31 days later.
``A Death in Belmont'' by Sebastian Junger (Norton). The author of ``The Perfect Storm'' takes on the Boston Strangler, who briefly worked in Junger's home in 1963 and even had his picture taken with baby Sebastian and his mom.
``Fast Boat to China: Corporate Flight and the Consequences of Free Trade -- Lessons from Shanghai'' by Andrew Ross (Pantheon). When Ross went to China to investigate outsourcing, he discovered the place was chaotic yet poised to become even more competitive. One consolation: Ross finds most Chinese workers are just as miserable as the average U.S. cube dweller.
``America Back on Track'' by Edward Kennedy (Viking). The senator advocates re-establishing ``a sound energy conservation policy'' and refocusing government spending on education and health care, instead of warfare.
``The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals'' by Michael Pollan (Penguin). The bestselling author of ``The Botany of Desire'' walks into a supermarket and wonders where all the stuff comes from. Curiously, he finishes his often unnerving investigation without turning vegetarian.
``Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family and Fatherland'' by Carmen Callil (Cape). Virago founder Callil goes in search of Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, the Vichy government's commissioner for Jewish affairs, a collaborator who was personally responsible for the deportation of thousands of French Jews.
``Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero'' by David Maraniss (Simon & Schuster). Maraniss has written a sturdy ode to Pittsburgh Pirate Roberto Clemente, the first Latino to enter Cooperstown. He died on New Year's Eve 1972 while delivering aid to Nicaraguan earthquake victims.
``Wall Street Versus America: The Rampant Greed and Dishonesty That Imperil Your Investments'' by Gary Weiss (Portfolio). Former Business Week reporter Weiss sees malfeasance at all levels of the investment chain, from the cold-calling boiler room operators to fee-charging blue chip fund managers.
``Sweet and Low: A Family Story'' by Rich Cohen (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). The author is the disinherited grandson of the short-order cook who created the single-serving sugar packet and later invented Sweet'N Low. Using court documents and oral history, Cohen recounts the bittersweet tale of how his family's Brooklyn business went global, nearly went bust, and slowly tore the family apart.
``Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire'' by Morris Berman (Norton). Berman says the U.S. economy can't help collapsing beneath mounting debt and expensive wars. Meanwhile, suburban consumers are guided to their own demise by a ``seamless propaganda machine'' run by soulless corporations.
``An Ordinary Man: An Autobiography'' by Paul Rusesabagina. (Viking): The hero of the movie ``Hotel Rwanda,'' who sheltered more than 1,200 Tutsis and Hutus in his hotel during the 1994 Rwanda genocide.
``Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change From Hawaii to Iraq'' by Stephen Kinzer (Times Books). How many governments has the United States overthrown? The answer is 14, writes New York Times foreign correspondent Kinzer, in this critical survey of strong-arm American diplomacy. Hawaii was the first; Iraq the last (for now, anyway).
``Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves, and the American Revolution'' by Simon Schama (Ecco). If you were black during the Revolutionary War, which side would you want to win? Schama reveals that tens of thousands of slaves and freedmen supported the British, who offered emancipation if they fought against the Americans. Some were recaptured, some escaped to Nova Scotia, while others fled to Sierra Leone.
``Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America's War With Militant Islam'' by Mark Bowden (Atlantic). The author of ``Black Hawk Down'' reconstructs the harrowing 444 days, starting on Nov. 4, 1979, when 52 Americans were held hostage in the U.S. embassy in Tehran, Iran. Bowden explains events from the point of view of the Iranians, Americans and diplomats caught up in the long showdown.
Fiction
``The Other Side of You'' by Salley Vickers (Fourth Estate). The former psychoanalyst and author of ``Miss Garnet's Angel'' writes about a psychiatrist and his patient, a failed suicide who shares his unusual fascination with death. Set partly in Rome, it also casts a painting by Caravaggio in a key role.
``Challenger Park'' by Stephen Harrigan (Knopf). Space Shuttle astronaut Lucy Kincheloe is floating 240 miles above Earth and traveling 17,500 miles an hour when she learns that the troubles she left behind in Houston, including a sick child and disintegrating marriage, are minor compared with what can go wrong in space.
``The Messiah of Morris Avenue'' by Tony Hendra (Holt). Hendra's latest features crusading journalist Johnny Greco who threatens the hegemony of a futuristic America ruled by right- wing fundamentalists by reporting on the second-coming of Christ in the guise of a lefty rebel named Jay.
``This Book Will Save Your Life'' by A.M. Homes (Viking). Richard Novak is a divorced day trader living in L.A. who learns his house is being swallowed by a giant sink hole. Meanwhile, the city must contend with earthquakes and feral Chihuahuas. A series of odd events lead Novak to reconciliation with both his ex-wife and estranged son.
``Elements of Style'' by Wendy Wasserstein (Knopf). The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, who died in January, finished this ``Sex and the City''-style comedy of manners set in the moneyed milieu of New York's Upper East Side. The cast includes feuding philanthropists, an aging Oscar-winning film director and a kindly pediatrician.
``Black Swan Green'' by David Mitchell (Random House). The British author imagines one year in the life of 13-year-old Jason, living in Worcestershire, England, in 1982. It's far more accessible than his cryptic Booker Prize-nominated novels ``Cloud Atlas'' and ``Number9Dream.''
``The Sand Cafe'' by Neil MacFarquhar (PublicAffairs). The Cairo bureau chief of the New York Times has written a satire of reporting set in Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War. Wire- service reporter Angus Dalziel must try to outwit and outlast better-paid and better-looking TV reporters -- remember the ``Scud Stud'' -- in pursuit of the story.
``Seeing'' by Jose Saramago (Harcourt). This new political fable from the Portuguese Nobel Prize-winner, a sequel to his 1997 novel ``Blindness,'' depicts a national election gone awry. When more than 70 percent of the votes are found blank, the befuddled authorities impose a state of emergency. Saramago may be master of the surreal, but his dense, page-long sentences don't make for easy reading.
``The Lightning Keeper'' by Starling Lawrence (HarperCollins). In Connecticut in 1914, Harriet Bigelow is trying to save her family's iron works from ruin, when a young Balkan inventor comes along and promises to revive her company and revolutionize production of electricity. Equal parts business saga and romance, Lawrence's second novel, a sequel to his first, ``Montenegro'' won praise from reclusive writer Harper Lee.
Monday, March 13, 2006
`Lapham' Returns, Banker Douses Fires, Superheroes Soar: Books
`Lapham' Returns, Banker Douses Fires, Superheroes Soar: Books
March 13 (Bloomberg) -- Harry March is a cantankerous writer. He lives on his own island in the Hamptons, where his only companions are a West Highland terrier and a stone statue of his ex-wife reading the New York Times.
Splendid isolation suits the hero of Roger Rosenblatt's novel, ``Lapham Rising'' (HarperCollins, 243 pages, $23.95). So naturally the author shatters Harry's peace on page one.
``Bang bang bang bang bang,'' the book begins.
A social-climbing playboy named Lapham is building a McMansion just across the water. March goes mad and begins to think his dog, Hector, is talking to him. ``I'll pray for you,'' says Hector at one point.
Rosenblatt, a long-time essayist for Time magazine, has written 10 books of essays and nonfiction and penned four off- Broadway plays. ``Lapham Rising,'' his debut novel, borrows from William Dean Howells's 1885 novel, ``The Rise of Silas Lapham,'' about a Vermont paint tycoon who masquerades as a Boston Brahmin.
This updated version satirizes the Hamptons, the New York summer retreat for celebrities and executives. Its little towns have ``the seductive apathy of a debutante, but none of the appealing cruelty,'' Harry grumbles. Chitchat at dinner parties turns on ``the best Pilates class on the planet,'' he sneers.
``Lapham Rising'' doesn't amount to more than the sum of such deliciously caustic observations. Nor is it meant to. So sit back and enjoy the ride.
Siege Weapon
Lapham's house is a castle. It includes a moat, a movie theater and a ``Tilles Blowhard,'' a jet engine-powered air conditioner that sounds ``like a lion's roar amplified over a vast public-address system.''
March plans to lay siege to this edifice of ego with a huge homemade catapult dubbed the ``Da Vinci.'' He fails, though the book is all the funnier for it. This is a must-read for seasonal renters and year-round residents alike.
Like Lapham, Bill Schoenberg lives in a ``gilded shack in the boondocks.'' His is a $3.3 million turreted house in the unfashionable Hudson River village of Harristown, New York, the setting for Nicholas Weinstock's novel, ``The Golden Hour'' (Morrow, 275 pages, $24.95).
Schoenberg is 46 and overweight. After 19 years of marriage and a two-decade run as an investment banker on Wall Street, he has ditched his job, left his South African interior-decorator wife, vacated their 11-room Manhattan penthouse and moved upstate with his collection of vintage wine. Why? Weinstock holds back that secret and keeps you reading.
`Hokey Civilization'
In Harristown, Schoenberg discovers an endearingly ``hokey civilization.'' He also finds a new sense of purpose, as well as camaraderie, when he joins the ragtag volunteer fire department.
Weinstock, who once served as a fireman, ably describes the routine bravery of those who rush into burning houses. By the finale, Schoenberg has gained a self-esteem that means more to him than the adulation he won as a banker nicknamed ``The Bull.''
New York fiction these days is stocked with characters reassessing their lives. Consider Nathaniel, the 28-year-old creator of a comic book called ``Passivityman'' in Deborah Eisenberg's fifth collection of short stories, ``Twilight of the Superheroes'' (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 240 pages, $23).
Before Sept. 11, 2001, the view from Nathaniel's 31st-floor Manhattan loft included the World Trade Center and was ``like looking down over the rim into a gigantic glass of champagne.'' After the terrorist attacks, the city became an ``open wound.'' Nathaniel realizes that his hip ``Passivityman'' isn't quite the hero Americans need post-9/11 and abandons the comic.
Real People
Eisenberg introduces us to dozens of such thoughtful people. We meet stoic Jewish immigrants living in the Midwest, a lonely divorcee traveling through Italy and a widowed art-gallery owner, among others. All cope with real problems: aging, unstable family members and a loss of confidence.
Throughout these six masterful stories Eisenberg proves that you don't necessarily need a novel to describe an entire life. Sometimes, 35 pages will do.
March 13 (Bloomberg) -- Harry March is a cantankerous writer. He lives on his own island in the Hamptons, where his only companions are a West Highland terrier and a stone statue of his ex-wife reading the New York Times.
Splendid isolation suits the hero of Roger Rosenblatt's novel, ``Lapham Rising'' (HarperCollins, 243 pages, $23.95). So naturally the author shatters Harry's peace on page one.
``Bang bang bang bang bang,'' the book begins.
A social-climbing playboy named Lapham is building a McMansion just across the water. March goes mad and begins to think his dog, Hector, is talking to him. ``I'll pray for you,'' says Hector at one point.
Rosenblatt, a long-time essayist for Time magazine, has written 10 books of essays and nonfiction and penned four off- Broadway plays. ``Lapham Rising,'' his debut novel, borrows from William Dean Howells's 1885 novel, ``The Rise of Silas Lapham,'' about a Vermont paint tycoon who masquerades as a Boston Brahmin.
This updated version satirizes the Hamptons, the New York summer retreat for celebrities and executives. Its little towns have ``the seductive apathy of a debutante, but none of the appealing cruelty,'' Harry grumbles. Chitchat at dinner parties turns on ``the best Pilates class on the planet,'' he sneers.
``Lapham Rising'' doesn't amount to more than the sum of such deliciously caustic observations. Nor is it meant to. So sit back and enjoy the ride.
Siege Weapon
Lapham's house is a castle. It includes a moat, a movie theater and a ``Tilles Blowhard,'' a jet engine-powered air conditioner that sounds ``like a lion's roar amplified over a vast public-address system.''
March plans to lay siege to this edifice of ego with a huge homemade catapult dubbed the ``Da Vinci.'' He fails, though the book is all the funnier for it. This is a must-read for seasonal renters and year-round residents alike.
Like Lapham, Bill Schoenberg lives in a ``gilded shack in the boondocks.'' His is a $3.3 million turreted house in the unfashionable Hudson River village of Harristown, New York, the setting for Nicholas Weinstock's novel, ``The Golden Hour'' (Morrow, 275 pages, $24.95).
Schoenberg is 46 and overweight. After 19 years of marriage and a two-decade run as an investment banker on Wall Street, he has ditched his job, left his South African interior-decorator wife, vacated their 11-room Manhattan penthouse and moved upstate with his collection of vintage wine. Why? Weinstock holds back that secret and keeps you reading.
`Hokey Civilization'
In Harristown, Schoenberg discovers an endearingly ``hokey civilization.'' He also finds a new sense of purpose, as well as camaraderie, when he joins the ragtag volunteer fire department.
Weinstock, who once served as a fireman, ably describes the routine bravery of those who rush into burning houses. By the finale, Schoenberg has gained a self-esteem that means more to him than the adulation he won as a banker nicknamed ``The Bull.''
New York fiction these days is stocked with characters reassessing their lives. Consider Nathaniel, the 28-year-old creator of a comic book called ``Passivityman'' in Deborah Eisenberg's fifth collection of short stories, ``Twilight of the Superheroes'' (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 240 pages, $23).
Before Sept. 11, 2001, the view from Nathaniel's 31st-floor Manhattan loft included the World Trade Center and was ``like looking down over the rim into a gigantic glass of champagne.'' After the terrorist attacks, the city became an ``open wound.'' Nathaniel realizes that his hip ``Passivityman'' isn't quite the hero Americans need post-9/11 and abandons the comic.
Real People
Eisenberg introduces us to dozens of such thoughtful people. We meet stoic Jewish immigrants living in the Midwest, a lonely divorcee traveling through Italy and a widowed art-gallery owner, among others. All cope with real problems: aging, unstable family members and a loss of confidence.
Throughout these six masterful stories Eisenberg proves that you don't necessarily need a novel to describe an entire life. Sometimes, 35 pages will do.
Tuesday, March 07, 2006
Chemical Arms Explained, Red Army Bared, Wiesel Renewed: Books
Chemical Arms Explained, Red Army Bared, Wiesel Renewed: Books
(The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of Bloomberg.)
By Edward Nawotka
March 7 (Bloomberg) -- As dusk settled over Ypres, Belgium, on April 22, 1915, German soldiers opened the valves on 5,730 cylinders of liquid chlorine buried in mud along the front lines. A cloud of poison drifted over French and Algerian troops in the opposing trenches, enveloping them ``in a greenish murk as if they had suddenly been plunged several feet underwater,'' writes Jonathan Tucker in ``War of Nerves: Chemical Warfare from World War I to Al-Qaeda'' (Pantheon, 479 pages, $30).
The gas ``seared their eyes and burned the lining of their bronchial tubes, causing blindness, coughing, violent nausea,'' Tucker says. The deadly assault broke a taboo, prompting France and Britain to retaliate with their own gas attacks. By the end of World War I, soldiers had been subjected to more than 124,000 metric tons of 39 different toxins.
Tucker, who specializes in arms control at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, warned of the dangers of biological warfare in his previous book, ``Scourge.'' His latest book spotlights a chemical arms race in the 20th century.
During the Cold War, the U.S. and Soviet Union were at the forefront of this contest. They produced nerve agents so potent that less than 10 milligrams were lethal. Developing countries joined the race to create ``the poor man's nuclear weapon.'' Though leading industrial nations have been destroying their chemical weapons, terrorists are seeking to build stockpiles, Tucker warns: To keep the world safe, we must tighten trade restrictions and enforce arms-control treaties.
`Ivan's War'
The Geneva Convention helped halt the widespread use of chemical weapons in World War II. Yet German soldiers did deploy them during the siege of the Crimean city Kerch in May 1941, Catherine Merridale writes in her gripping portrait of life as a Soviet solider, ``Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939- 1945'' (Metropolitan, 463 pages, $30; Faber, 20 pounds).
The siege had left some 176,000 Soviet troops dead; the Germans used gas to dispatch the last defenders, holed up in a quarry. In Soviet myth, the quarry ``became another Leningrad,'' Merridale says -- ``a place where heroes held out to the last.'' A professor at the University of London, Merridale interviewed some 200 veterans to learn how the mostly untrained, ill-equipped peasant soldiers lived and died. Their memories are grim: Hectored by government spies and goaded by machine-gun-toting officers, troops attacked Panzer divisions in human waves. The Red Army's fabled patriotism was a product of Soviet propaganda, Merridale says. The underfed troops were really driven by ``shared awe, shared faith, shared dread.'' Altogether, eight million Soviet soldiers died in the ``Nazi meat grinder.''
Elie Wiesel
Merridale paints the pivotal Soviet victories at Stalingrad and Kursk in bold strokes. She also picks out details of everyday hardship, from the brackish tea soldiers drank to the cloth strips they wound around their feet as socks. Her reappraisal of their sacrifices breaks ground for future scholars.
Few first-hand accounts of Nazi barbarity have made the Holocaust as palpable as Elie Wiesel's terse memoir ``Night.'' Yet this classic has long suffered from a stiff 1960 translation into English.
The author's wife, Marion Wiesel, has breathed new life into this remembrance of life and death in concentration camps in a fresh, lucid translation (Hill and Wang, 120 pages, $9). The timing couldn't be better. In January, U.S. television talk-show host Oprah Winfrey selected ``Night'' for her popular book club, guaranteeing millions of new readers.
`Terribly Alone'
Wiesel, now 77, grew up in Transylvania. He recounts how Nazis rounded up his Jewish family in 1944, when he was a teenager, and herded him and his father to Auschwitz and Buchenwald, where his father was beaten and died. He nearly abandoned his faith.
``My eyes had opened and I was alone, terribly alone in a world without God, without man,'' he writes.
Marion Wiesel's prose is more vernacular than the previous English translation, using more Yiddish words. Hundreds of accounts have been written about the Holocaust; ``Night'' remains a masterpiece of brief, brutal candor.
(The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of Bloomberg.)
By Edward Nawotka
March 7 (Bloomberg) -- As dusk settled over Ypres, Belgium, on April 22, 1915, German soldiers opened the valves on 5,730 cylinders of liquid chlorine buried in mud along the front lines. A cloud of poison drifted over French and Algerian troops in the opposing trenches, enveloping them ``in a greenish murk as if they had suddenly been plunged several feet underwater,'' writes Jonathan Tucker in ``War of Nerves: Chemical Warfare from World War I to Al-Qaeda'' (Pantheon, 479 pages, $30).
The gas ``seared their eyes and burned the lining of their bronchial tubes, causing blindness, coughing, violent nausea,'' Tucker says. The deadly assault broke a taboo, prompting France and Britain to retaliate with their own gas attacks. By the end of World War I, soldiers had been subjected to more than 124,000 metric tons of 39 different toxins.
Tucker, who specializes in arms control at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, warned of the dangers of biological warfare in his previous book, ``Scourge.'' His latest book spotlights a chemical arms race in the 20th century.
During the Cold War, the U.S. and Soviet Union were at the forefront of this contest. They produced nerve agents so potent that less than 10 milligrams were lethal. Developing countries joined the race to create ``the poor man's nuclear weapon.'' Though leading industrial nations have been destroying their chemical weapons, terrorists are seeking to build stockpiles, Tucker warns: To keep the world safe, we must tighten trade restrictions and enforce arms-control treaties.
`Ivan's War'
The Geneva Convention helped halt the widespread use of chemical weapons in World War II. Yet German soldiers did deploy them during the siege of the Crimean city Kerch in May 1941, Catherine Merridale writes in her gripping portrait of life as a Soviet solider, ``Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939- 1945'' (Metropolitan, 463 pages, $30; Faber, 20 pounds).
The siege had left some 176,000 Soviet troops dead; the Germans used gas to dispatch the last defenders, holed up in a quarry. In Soviet myth, the quarry ``became another Leningrad,'' Merridale says -- ``a place where heroes held out to the last.'' A professor at the University of London, Merridale interviewed some 200 veterans to learn how the mostly untrained, ill-equipped peasant soldiers lived and died. Their memories are grim: Hectored by government spies and goaded by machine-gun-toting officers, troops attacked Panzer divisions in human waves. The Red Army's fabled patriotism was a product of Soviet propaganda, Merridale says. The underfed troops were really driven by ``shared awe, shared faith, shared dread.'' Altogether, eight million Soviet soldiers died in the ``Nazi meat grinder.''
Elie Wiesel
Merridale paints the pivotal Soviet victories at Stalingrad and Kursk in bold strokes. She also picks out details of everyday hardship, from the brackish tea soldiers drank to the cloth strips they wound around their feet as socks. Her reappraisal of their sacrifices breaks ground for future scholars.
Few first-hand accounts of Nazi barbarity have made the Holocaust as palpable as Elie Wiesel's terse memoir ``Night.'' Yet this classic has long suffered from a stiff 1960 translation into English.
The author's wife, Marion Wiesel, has breathed new life into this remembrance of life and death in concentration camps in a fresh, lucid translation (Hill and Wang, 120 pages, $9). The timing couldn't be better. In January, U.S. television talk-show host Oprah Winfrey selected ``Night'' for her popular book club, guaranteeing millions of new readers.
`Terribly Alone'
Wiesel, now 77, grew up in Transylvania. He recounts how Nazis rounded up his Jewish family in 1944, when he was a teenager, and herded him and his father to Auschwitz and Buchenwald, where his father was beaten and died. He nearly abandoned his faith.
``My eyes had opened and I was alone, terribly alone in a world without God, without man,'' he writes.
Marion Wiesel's prose is more vernacular than the previous English translation, using more Yiddish words. Hundreds of accounts have been written about the Holocaust; ``Night'' remains a masterpiece of brief, brutal candor.
Wednesday, March 01, 2006
Seances, Special Ops and Bill James on Baseball: March Books
Seances, Special Ops and Bill James on Baseball: March Books
(The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of Bloomberg.)
By Edward Nawotka
March 1 (Bloomberg) -- It's March, when the Emperor penguins in the Antarctic start their long march to mate. Many humans obsess over the Oscars. For those who'd rather be reading, we offer this preview of selected fiction and nonfiction coming in the month.
Nonfiction
``A Year in the World: Journeys of a Passionate Traveler,'' by Frances Mayes (Broadway): Her bestselling ``Under the Tuscan Sun'' prompted an invasion of her Italian hometown of Cortona by camera-wielding tour groups. So Mayes takes off for some less- obnoxious locales, including Portugal, Turkey, Greece and North Africa.
``America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power and the Neoconservative Legacy,'' by Francis Fukuyama (Yale University): Fukuyama's hugely influential 1992 book, ``The End of History and the Last Man,'' asserted that liberal capitalist democracies were the ultimate manifestation of civilization, sort of. His new treatise says the neoconservative urge to spread democracy through ``preventative warfare'' has become a ``benevolent hegemony'' and may have gone too far.
``American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century,'' by Kevin Phillips (Viking): According to this former Republican strategist, every world-dominating power down through time has four things in common: militant religion, resource problems, ballooning debt and globe-spanning ambition. Does that sound like the U.S. in the beginning of the 21st century?
``Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq,'' by Michael R. Gordon and General Bernard E. Trainor (Pantheon): Gordon, a correspondent for the New York Times, and Trainor, a retired Marine Corps general, had first-hand access to General Tommy Franks, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and others during the planning and execution of the war. They promise an insider's account full of revelations.
``Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney,'' by Paul Johnson (HarperCollins): This is the second volume in a trilogy that started with 1988's ``Intellectuals.'' The popular conservative historian now serves up brief bios of artists, including composers Bach and Wagner, scribes Austen and Dickens, fashionistas Balenciaga and Dior. Expect the third volume, ``Heroes,'' in another two decades.
``Man in the Shadows: Inside the Middle East Crisis With a Man Who Led the Mossad,'' by Efraim Halevy (St. Martin's): The ex-spook offers a unique perspective on Middle East politics from his perch atop Israel's secret service. His book provides a blow-by-blow of backdoor negotiations with the Palestinians, diplomatic clashes with the U.S. and more -- though don't expect him to reveal any state secrets.
``Miracles on the Water: The Attack on the S.S. City of Benares,'' by Tom Nagorski (Hyperion): An ABC news producer recounts the 1940 sinking of the British passenger ship by a German submarine. A total of 406 crew and passengers were aboard, 90 of whom were children. Just 13 of the children survived the gale-force winds and days adrift.
``The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky,'' by Ken Dornstein (Random House): The author's brother David, an aspiring writer, was just 25 when he died in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Using diaries and his own investigative wits, Dornstein reconstructs his brother's brief and ultimately tragic life. In addition to writing the book David never would, Ken has crafted a paean to brotherly love.
``The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences,'' by Louis Uchitelle (Knopf): Sad but true: Sometimes companies have to let workers go for the sake of profitability. This polemic by a New York Times reporter argues, in part, that corporations overuse the pink slip, and no U.S. government since the 1970s has tried to stop them. A jeremiad for Joe Six Pack and Jim Middle Manager.
``The Merchant of Power: Sam Insull, Thomas Edison and the Creation of the Modern Metropolis,'' by John Wasik (Palgrave Macmillan): Sam Insull amassed a fortune of more than $1 billion in today's money and lost it all in the Great Depression. He died with less than a dollar in his pocket. Wasik, a Bloomberg News columnist, tells the life story of America's first power baron: the man who developed the power grid and was instrumental in the creation of General Electric.
``The Mind of Bill James: How a Complete Outsider Changed Baseball,'' by Scott Gray (Doubleday): The unlikely story of how a Kansas factory worker changed the way experts thought about baseball. If you don't already know who Bill James is and why his ``Historical Baseball Abstract'' is so influential, then this subtle dissection of James's ideas will matter to you even less than a midseason doubleheader between the Detroit Tigers and the Milwaukee Brewers.
``The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth,'' by Tim Flannery (Atlantic Monthly): Prompted by the perceived threat of global warming, the Australian scientist delivers a terrifying and convincing account of man's abuse of the planet, as well as the consequences it may have for our grandchildren and beyond. If you think the weather is wild now, just wait.
``The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good,'' by William Easterly (Penguin): After trillions of dollars in aid sent from the mature economies to developing nations during the past 50 years, why is so much of the world still so poor? The New York University economist and World Bank veteran bluntly explains why he thinks we're going about it the wrong way. His advice: Think global, act local -- really local.
``To Dare and to Conquer: Special Operations and the Destiny of Nations, From Achilles to Al Qaeda,'' by Derek Leebaert (Little, Brown): An exhaustive alternative history of warfare as viewed from the perspective of clandestine warriors, who often enabled small armies to defeat much larger ones. Leebaert starts with the Trojan Horse and ends with Delta Force and the CIA. Break out your night-vision goggles: This one will hold your attention long after dark.
Fiction
``Brookland,'' by Emily Barton (Farrar, Straus & Giroux): The most prize-worthy novel of the month is the tale of three sisters in 18th-century Brooklyn, one of whom dreams of a fantastic bridge across the East River to Manhattan. An early feminist, she bides her time working at the family's gin distillery, until she can take it over and have access to the resources to make her dream come true.
``Intuition,'' by Allegra Goodman (Dial): An intriguing tale of infighting at a cash-poor Boston cancer lab, where a new treatment appears to have reduced the size of tumors in mice and could bring a funding windfall. As the various scientists struggle to handle the fallout of their apparent success, a battle erupts between science and PR. This may be the first literary soap opera for the pocket-protector brigade.
``The Ethical Assassin,'' by David Liss (Ballantine): The author's previous thrillers, ``A Conspiracy of Paper'' and ``A Spectacle of Corruption,'' expertly depicted the origins of the stock market and 18th-century financial matters. Now Liss looks at the economics of -- door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen in Florida circa 1985? Yes. It's quite entertaining, not least for the fey hit man with an animal-rights agenda.
``Apex Hides the Hurt,'' by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday): The third novel by Whitehead, a much-lauded black novelist, features a branding consultant caught up in a Midwestern town's debate over its name. The pedantic debate swirls around race, history and the import of language itself. The book's title refers to a multicultural bandage that will match your skin tone -- or your money back!
``A Death in Vienna,'' by Frank Tallis (Grove): Psychoanalyst Max Liebermann, a fictional disciple of Sigmund Freud's, assists his friend Detective Oskar Rheinhardt in investigating the murder of a medium mid-seance. Initially, the signs suggest a supernatural killer. Using the techniques of psychiatry to interrogate suspects, Liebermann slowly unravels the mystery against the picturesque background of Viennese cafe society in the early 20th century.
``A Dirty Job,'' by Christopher Moore (Morrow): In Moore's latest offbeat yarn, San Franciscan Charlie Asher watches as his child dies during birth and is scooped up by the Death Merchants, who then recruit Charlie to help save the world. Huh? It all leads up to a duel with Death beneath San Francisco's financial district. Moore is heir apparent to humorist Tom Robbins, meaning he's freaky and fun but also an acquired taste.
``The Righteous Men,'' by Sam Bourne (HarperCollins): When his wife is kidnapped, rookie crime reporter Will Monroe is forced to conclude that several killings around the world are connected. This pseudonymous fiction debut by Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland involves a race against time, strewn with bestselling ingredients like Bible codes and ancient prophecies.
``Keeping the World Away,'' by Margaret Forster (Chatto): A still life by the painter Gwen John is the central character in a novel charting its fictional adventures. Over the course of more than a hundred years, the canvas travels from Paris to the Tate Gallery via the lost-property office of a railway station, touching the lives of six women.
(The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of Bloomberg.)
By Edward Nawotka
March 1 (Bloomberg) -- It's March, when the Emperor penguins in the Antarctic start their long march to mate. Many humans obsess over the Oscars. For those who'd rather be reading, we offer this preview of selected fiction and nonfiction coming in the month.
Nonfiction
``A Year in the World: Journeys of a Passionate Traveler,'' by Frances Mayes (Broadway): Her bestselling ``Under the Tuscan Sun'' prompted an invasion of her Italian hometown of Cortona by camera-wielding tour groups. So Mayes takes off for some less- obnoxious locales, including Portugal, Turkey, Greece and North Africa.
``America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power and the Neoconservative Legacy,'' by Francis Fukuyama (Yale University): Fukuyama's hugely influential 1992 book, ``The End of History and the Last Man,'' asserted that liberal capitalist democracies were the ultimate manifestation of civilization, sort of. His new treatise says the neoconservative urge to spread democracy through ``preventative warfare'' has become a ``benevolent hegemony'' and may have gone too far.
``American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century,'' by Kevin Phillips (Viking): According to this former Republican strategist, every world-dominating power down through time has four things in common: militant religion, resource problems, ballooning debt and globe-spanning ambition. Does that sound like the U.S. in the beginning of the 21st century?
``Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq,'' by Michael R. Gordon and General Bernard E. Trainor (Pantheon): Gordon, a correspondent for the New York Times, and Trainor, a retired Marine Corps general, had first-hand access to General Tommy Franks, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and others during the planning and execution of the war. They promise an insider's account full of revelations.
``Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney,'' by Paul Johnson (HarperCollins): This is the second volume in a trilogy that started with 1988's ``Intellectuals.'' The popular conservative historian now serves up brief bios of artists, including composers Bach and Wagner, scribes Austen and Dickens, fashionistas Balenciaga and Dior. Expect the third volume, ``Heroes,'' in another two decades.
``Man in the Shadows: Inside the Middle East Crisis With a Man Who Led the Mossad,'' by Efraim Halevy (St. Martin's): The ex-spook offers a unique perspective on Middle East politics from his perch atop Israel's secret service. His book provides a blow-by-blow of backdoor negotiations with the Palestinians, diplomatic clashes with the U.S. and more -- though don't expect him to reveal any state secrets.
``Miracles on the Water: The Attack on the S.S. City of Benares,'' by Tom Nagorski (Hyperion): An ABC news producer recounts the 1940 sinking of the British passenger ship by a German submarine. A total of 406 crew and passengers were aboard, 90 of whom were children. Just 13 of the children survived the gale-force winds and days adrift.
``The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky,'' by Ken Dornstein (Random House): The author's brother David, an aspiring writer, was just 25 when he died in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Using diaries and his own investigative wits, Dornstein reconstructs his brother's brief and ultimately tragic life. In addition to writing the book David never would, Ken has crafted a paean to brotherly love.
``The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences,'' by Louis Uchitelle (Knopf): Sad but true: Sometimes companies have to let workers go for the sake of profitability. This polemic by a New York Times reporter argues, in part, that corporations overuse the pink slip, and no U.S. government since the 1970s has tried to stop them. A jeremiad for Joe Six Pack and Jim Middle Manager.
``The Merchant of Power: Sam Insull, Thomas Edison and the Creation of the Modern Metropolis,'' by John Wasik (Palgrave Macmillan): Sam Insull amassed a fortune of more than $1 billion in today's money and lost it all in the Great Depression. He died with less than a dollar in his pocket. Wasik, a Bloomberg News columnist, tells the life story of America's first power baron: the man who developed the power grid and was instrumental in the creation of General Electric.
``The Mind of Bill James: How a Complete Outsider Changed Baseball,'' by Scott Gray (Doubleday): The unlikely story of how a Kansas factory worker changed the way experts thought about baseball. If you don't already know who Bill James is and why his ``Historical Baseball Abstract'' is so influential, then this subtle dissection of James's ideas will matter to you even less than a midseason doubleheader between the Detroit Tigers and the Milwaukee Brewers.
``The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth,'' by Tim Flannery (Atlantic Monthly): Prompted by the perceived threat of global warming, the Australian scientist delivers a terrifying and convincing account of man's abuse of the planet, as well as the consequences it may have for our grandchildren and beyond. If you think the weather is wild now, just wait.
``The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good,'' by William Easterly (Penguin): After trillions of dollars in aid sent from the mature economies to developing nations during the past 50 years, why is so much of the world still so poor? The New York University economist and World Bank veteran bluntly explains why he thinks we're going about it the wrong way. His advice: Think global, act local -- really local.
``To Dare and to Conquer: Special Operations and the Destiny of Nations, From Achilles to Al Qaeda,'' by Derek Leebaert (Little, Brown): An exhaustive alternative history of warfare as viewed from the perspective of clandestine warriors, who often enabled small armies to defeat much larger ones. Leebaert starts with the Trojan Horse and ends with Delta Force and the CIA. Break out your night-vision goggles: This one will hold your attention long after dark.
Fiction
``Brookland,'' by Emily Barton (Farrar, Straus & Giroux): The most prize-worthy novel of the month is the tale of three sisters in 18th-century Brooklyn, one of whom dreams of a fantastic bridge across the East River to Manhattan. An early feminist, she bides her time working at the family's gin distillery, until she can take it over and have access to the resources to make her dream come true.
``Intuition,'' by Allegra Goodman (Dial): An intriguing tale of infighting at a cash-poor Boston cancer lab, where a new treatment appears to have reduced the size of tumors in mice and could bring a funding windfall. As the various scientists struggle to handle the fallout of their apparent success, a battle erupts between science and PR. This may be the first literary soap opera for the pocket-protector brigade.
``The Ethical Assassin,'' by David Liss (Ballantine): The author's previous thrillers, ``A Conspiracy of Paper'' and ``A Spectacle of Corruption,'' expertly depicted the origins of the stock market and 18th-century financial matters. Now Liss looks at the economics of -- door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen in Florida circa 1985? Yes. It's quite entertaining, not least for the fey hit man with an animal-rights agenda.
``Apex Hides the Hurt,'' by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday): The third novel by Whitehead, a much-lauded black novelist, features a branding consultant caught up in a Midwestern town's debate over its name. The pedantic debate swirls around race, history and the import of language itself. The book's title refers to a multicultural bandage that will match your skin tone -- or your money back!
``A Death in Vienna,'' by Frank Tallis (Grove): Psychoanalyst Max Liebermann, a fictional disciple of Sigmund Freud's, assists his friend Detective Oskar Rheinhardt in investigating the murder of a medium mid-seance. Initially, the signs suggest a supernatural killer. Using the techniques of psychiatry to interrogate suspects, Liebermann slowly unravels the mystery against the picturesque background of Viennese cafe society in the early 20th century.
``A Dirty Job,'' by Christopher Moore (Morrow): In Moore's latest offbeat yarn, San Franciscan Charlie Asher watches as his child dies during birth and is scooped up by the Death Merchants, who then recruit Charlie to help save the world. Huh? It all leads up to a duel with Death beneath San Francisco's financial district. Moore is heir apparent to humorist Tom Robbins, meaning he's freaky and fun but also an acquired taste.
``The Righteous Men,'' by Sam Bourne (HarperCollins): When his wife is kidnapped, rookie crime reporter Will Monroe is forced to conclude that several killings around the world are connected. This pseudonymous fiction debut by Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland involves a race against time, strewn with bestselling ingredients like Bible codes and ancient prophecies.
``Keeping the World Away,'' by Margaret Forster (Chatto): A still life by the painter Gwen John is the central character in a novel charting its fictional adventures. Over the course of more than a hundred years, the canvas travels from Paris to the Tate Gallery via the lost-property office of a railway station, touching the lives of six women.
Monday, February 27, 2006
KPMG's O'Kelly Meets Death, Faux Tocqueville, Basketball: Books
KPMG's O'Kelly Meets Death, Faux Tocqueville, Basketball: Books
(The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of Bloomberg.)
By Edward Nawotka
Feb. 27 (Bloomberg) -- On May 24, 2005, Eugene O'Kelly of KPMG LLP peered at a magnetic resonance image of his brain. The picture was ``milky, with dots of varying sizes scattered all over the place,'' he later recalled.
O'Kelly was looking at cancerous tumors. At 53, the chairman and chief executive officer of the U.S. arm of accounting firm KPMG International had three months to live.
True to form, O'Kelly made an executive decision. He vowed to ``continue to live by the rules I'd followed in my business life,'' he writes at the outset of ``Chasing Daylight: How My Forthcoming Death Transformed My Life'' (McGraw-Hill, 179 pages, $19.95). What follows is one of the most unexpected and touching books you're likely to read this year.
``Chasing Daylight'' is both a handbook on how to ``succeed at death'' and a memoir of the months leading up to O'Kelly's passing on Sept. 10, 2005. ``As head guy,'' he writes, ``I had focused on building and planning for the future. Now, I would have to learn the true value of the present.''
Two weeks after his diagnosis, O'Kelly resigned as chairman and CEO, staying on at KPMG only as a partner. Initially, he set himself the goal of living long enough to attend a partners' meeting that November. As his energy flagged, though, he began to focus on ``unwinding relationships with close lifetime friends.''
`Perfect Moments'
O'Kelly sought to create ``perfect moments'' for each to remember him by, be it a final talk or a boat ride on Lake Tahoe. He spent significant time with his wife and 14-year-old daughter.
It was a remarkable reversal for a man who had previously booked his schedule a year or more in advance. Many people talk about living in the present. O'Kelly learned how to do it.
If anyone should savor the moment, it's a player on any of the ``Final Four'' teams vying for the U.S. National Collegiate Athletic Association's Division I men's basketball championship.
``Most players dream of being in one Final Four,'' John Feinstein writes in ``Last Dance: Behind the Scenes at the Final Four'' (Little, Brown, 370 pages, $25.95). ``Only a handful get to play in more than one.''
Feinstein's brisk book -- his 19th to date -- recounts classic Final Four moments, such as North Carolina State's upset win over Houston in the 1983 title game. Throughout, the author uses the 2005 Final Four in St. Louis as a backdrop.
Unfortunately, a reader can take only so many buzzer beaters and flagrant fouls. By the last chapter, when North Carolina defeats top-ranked Illinois to win the 2005 title, the book has become one long blur, like a highlight reel on fast forward. This book is mostly for die-hard fans of perennial Final Four teams.
Lap Dancers
American sports aren't high on the agenda of French author Bernard-Henri Levy, who crisscrossed the U.S. to write ``American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville'' (Random House, 309 pages, $24.95).
Even when Levy visits the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York, he sniffs. ``This is not a museum; it's a church,'' he says.
Levy prefers to hobnob with a bewildering array of movie stars, authors and semi-celebrities, including Sharon Stone, Norman Mailer and Ron Reagan Jr. He would have done better to hang out with Joe Six Pack.
As the Frenchman careens across the country, he becomes as breathless as a blogger. He rails against America's ``heinous and grotesque fascination'' with guns. He enthuses about Seattle. Lap dancers in New Orleans, Levy says, are ``so much bolder and more cheerful than the cloned dolls in the Las Vegas clubs.''
By the end of this book, you're worn out -- as if you've sat through a slide show of out-of-focus vacation snapshots narrated by your pretentious foreign cousin.
(The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of Bloomberg.)
By Edward Nawotka
Feb. 27 (Bloomberg) -- On May 24, 2005, Eugene O'Kelly of KPMG LLP peered at a magnetic resonance image of his brain. The picture was ``milky, with dots of varying sizes scattered all over the place,'' he later recalled.
O'Kelly was looking at cancerous tumors. At 53, the chairman and chief executive officer of the U.S. arm of accounting firm KPMG International had three months to live.
True to form, O'Kelly made an executive decision. He vowed to ``continue to live by the rules I'd followed in my business life,'' he writes at the outset of ``Chasing Daylight: How My Forthcoming Death Transformed My Life'' (McGraw-Hill, 179 pages, $19.95). What follows is one of the most unexpected and touching books you're likely to read this year.
``Chasing Daylight'' is both a handbook on how to ``succeed at death'' and a memoir of the months leading up to O'Kelly's passing on Sept. 10, 2005. ``As head guy,'' he writes, ``I had focused on building and planning for the future. Now, I would have to learn the true value of the present.''
Two weeks after his diagnosis, O'Kelly resigned as chairman and CEO, staying on at KPMG only as a partner. Initially, he set himself the goal of living long enough to attend a partners' meeting that November. As his energy flagged, though, he began to focus on ``unwinding relationships with close lifetime friends.''
`Perfect Moments'
O'Kelly sought to create ``perfect moments'' for each to remember him by, be it a final talk or a boat ride on Lake Tahoe. He spent significant time with his wife and 14-year-old daughter.
It was a remarkable reversal for a man who had previously booked his schedule a year or more in advance. Many people talk about living in the present. O'Kelly learned how to do it.
If anyone should savor the moment, it's a player on any of the ``Final Four'' teams vying for the U.S. National Collegiate Athletic Association's Division I men's basketball championship.
``Most players dream of being in one Final Four,'' John Feinstein writes in ``Last Dance: Behind the Scenes at the Final Four'' (Little, Brown, 370 pages, $25.95). ``Only a handful get to play in more than one.''
Feinstein's brisk book -- his 19th to date -- recounts classic Final Four moments, such as North Carolina State's upset win over Houston in the 1983 title game. Throughout, the author uses the 2005 Final Four in St. Louis as a backdrop.
Unfortunately, a reader can take only so many buzzer beaters and flagrant fouls. By the last chapter, when North Carolina defeats top-ranked Illinois to win the 2005 title, the book has become one long blur, like a highlight reel on fast forward. This book is mostly for die-hard fans of perennial Final Four teams.
Lap Dancers
American sports aren't high on the agenda of French author Bernard-Henri Levy, who crisscrossed the U.S. to write ``American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville'' (Random House, 309 pages, $24.95).
Even when Levy visits the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York, he sniffs. ``This is not a museum; it's a church,'' he says.
Levy prefers to hobnob with a bewildering array of movie stars, authors and semi-celebrities, including Sharon Stone, Norman Mailer and Ron Reagan Jr. He would have done better to hang out with Joe Six Pack.
As the Frenchman careens across the country, he becomes as breathless as a blogger. He rails against America's ``heinous and grotesque fascination'' with guns. He enthuses about Seattle. Lap dancers in New Orleans, Levy says, are ``so much bolder and more cheerful than the cloned dolls in the Las Vegas clubs.''
By the end of this book, you're worn out -- as if you've sat through a slide show of out-of-focus vacation snapshots narrated by your pretentious foreign cousin.
Monday, February 20, 2006
Sex, Lies and Memoirs: Callahan on `Cheating Culture'
Sex, Lies and Memoirs: Callahan on `Cheating Culture'
By Edward Nawotka
Feb. 9 (Bloomberg) -- Only a hermit could have missed the
uproar over James Frey, who lied about his troubled past in his
bestselling memoir, ``A Million Little Pieces.''
First reported by Web site thesmokinggun.com last month, the
news prompted a rebuke from U.S. talk-show host Oprah Winfrey and
helped unmask other fakers.
Author JT Leroy, for example, seduced literary insiders by
telling them he was a bisexual West Virginian in his 20s who was
dying of AIDS. ``He,'' the New York Times reported, is actually
one Laura Albert, a 40-year-old mother from San Francisco.
Then there's memoirist ``Nasdijj,'' who said he was a Navajo
suffering from Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. LA Weekly and the News &
Observer of Raleigh, North Carolina, have confirmed that he's Tim
Barrus, a white writer of gay erotica.
To try to understand what's going on, I turned to David
Callahan, author of ``The Cheating Culture'' (Harcourt, 366
pages, $14), a book that explores the recent rise of plagiarism,
accounting fraud and other forms of dishonesty. Callahan will
publish a new book, ``The Moral Center,'' in September. I talked
to him yesterday by phone from his home in New York.
Culture of Narcissism
Nawotka: With so many fraudsters selling books these days,
what's happening to publishing? You shared an agent with
``Nasdijj.'' Is fraud becoming more prevalent?
Callahan: It's hard to know if there's more of it -- or if
there is just a spate of these coming to light. Cheating and
deception by their very nature want to go undetected. I'm
reluctant to say that literary fraud is on the increase.
Incentives are on the increase. In the world of writing, we live
in a winner-take-all economy. James Frey is making millions while
the typical writer is barely paying the rent.
Nawotka: Why don't they just publish novels?
Callahan: We live in a self-revelatory age, a culture of
narcissism, and want to share in other people's inner lives.
Novels don't cater to that in same way that memoirs do. Everybody
wants to break out and be one of the stars. One of the ways to do
that is to tell a larger-than-life story.
Nawotka: So is there a fraud genre in literature?
Callahan: There is a long tradition in the memoir business
of exaggerating the truth. There's also a hoax genre as well.
Remember ``Hitler's Diaries''? That was a hoax.
Crossing the Line
Nawotka: Does that mean we need to make some allowances for
the memoir genre? Surely Casanova made a few things up.
Callahan: Unless we do, there will not be interesting
memoirs. No one has total recall, especially when it comes to
writing about personal events. The only way to keep readers
involved is to take some licenses in terms of fleshing out
conversations and scenes. But is it OK to go on for five pages?
No. There's a consensus that James Frey crossed the line.
Nawotka: Do you think Frey believes that what he did was
wrong?
Callahan: Yes, but the question has to be, ``would he do it
again?'' The choices are write a dull memoir and sink without a
trace or make up stuff, sell 3 million copies and have to
apologize and be humiliated. I think he'd pick option B. A lot of
people would. The gains from cheating outweigh the downsides.
Nawotka: How so? Some critics have called for him to donate
his $3 million to $4 million in royalties to charity.
Callahan: Then he can turn around and sell another book
about his lying problem. You know James Frey will be back with
some redemption story, just as Martha Stewart came back with
hers. We live in the kind of society that loves to tear people
down and to build them back up again.
Legal Action
Nawotka: Is this why some readers forgive Frey?
Callahan: Readers want to be entertained. They read to be
moved. Some may feel betrayed because they were manipulated.
Nawotka: Some are even bringing legal action against him.
Callahan: That's silly.
Nawotka: What role do the media play in this? Has reality
television changed our perception of reality?
Callahan: The media are constantly raising the bar on how
sensational something has to be to get people's attention. It's
not surprising nonfiction authors try to feed that appetite. This
is about our addiction to the sensational.
Nawotka: Are you surprised by the amount of attention this
has gotten?
Callahan: Nobody died, was hurt or lost money -- except,
perhaps, for the cover price of the book. Nothing bad happened to
anybody, yet this has gotten more coverage than the genocide in
Sudan. It just shows you how much the media love a good scandal.
By Edward Nawotka
Feb. 9 (Bloomberg) -- Only a hermit could have missed the
uproar over James Frey, who lied about his troubled past in his
bestselling memoir, ``A Million Little Pieces.''
First reported by Web site thesmokinggun.com last month, the
news prompted a rebuke from U.S. talk-show host Oprah Winfrey and
helped unmask other fakers.
Author JT Leroy, for example, seduced literary insiders by
telling them he was a bisexual West Virginian in his 20s who was
dying of AIDS. ``He,'' the New York Times reported, is actually
one Laura Albert, a 40-year-old mother from San Francisco.
Then there's memoirist ``Nasdijj,'' who said he was a Navajo
suffering from Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. LA Weekly and the News &
Observer of Raleigh, North Carolina, have confirmed that he's Tim
Barrus, a white writer of gay erotica.
To try to understand what's going on, I turned to David
Callahan, author of ``The Cheating Culture'' (Harcourt, 366
pages, $14), a book that explores the recent rise of plagiarism,
accounting fraud and other forms of dishonesty. Callahan will
publish a new book, ``The Moral Center,'' in September. I talked
to him yesterday by phone from his home in New York.
Culture of Narcissism
Nawotka: With so many fraudsters selling books these days,
what's happening to publishing? You shared an agent with
``Nasdijj.'' Is fraud becoming more prevalent?
Callahan: It's hard to know if there's more of it -- or if
there is just a spate of these coming to light. Cheating and
deception by their very nature want to go undetected. I'm
reluctant to say that literary fraud is on the increase.
Incentives are on the increase. In the world of writing, we live
in a winner-take-all economy. James Frey is making millions while
the typical writer is barely paying the rent.
Nawotka: Why don't they just publish novels?
Callahan: We live in a self-revelatory age, a culture of
narcissism, and want to share in other people's inner lives.
Novels don't cater to that in same way that memoirs do. Everybody
wants to break out and be one of the stars. One of the ways to do
that is to tell a larger-than-life story.
Nawotka: So is there a fraud genre in literature?
Callahan: There is a long tradition in the memoir business
of exaggerating the truth. There's also a hoax genre as well.
Remember ``Hitler's Diaries''? That was a hoax.
Crossing the Line
Nawotka: Does that mean we need to make some allowances for
the memoir genre? Surely Casanova made a few things up.
Callahan: Unless we do, there will not be interesting
memoirs. No one has total recall, especially when it comes to
writing about personal events. The only way to keep readers
involved is to take some licenses in terms of fleshing out
conversations and scenes. But is it OK to go on for five pages?
No. There's a consensus that James Frey crossed the line.
Nawotka: Do you think Frey believes that what he did was
wrong?
Callahan: Yes, but the question has to be, ``would he do it
again?'' The choices are write a dull memoir and sink without a
trace or make up stuff, sell 3 million copies and have to
apologize and be humiliated. I think he'd pick option B. A lot of
people would. The gains from cheating outweigh the downsides.
Nawotka: How so? Some critics have called for him to donate
his $3 million to $4 million in royalties to charity.
Callahan: Then he can turn around and sell another book
about his lying problem. You know James Frey will be back with
some redemption story, just as Martha Stewart came back with
hers. We live in the kind of society that loves to tear people
down and to build them back up again.
Legal Action
Nawotka: Is this why some readers forgive Frey?
Callahan: Readers want to be entertained. They read to be
moved. Some may feel betrayed because they were manipulated.
Nawotka: Some are even bringing legal action against him.
Callahan: That's silly.
Nawotka: What role do the media play in this? Has reality
television changed our perception of reality?
Callahan: The media are constantly raising the bar on how
sensational something has to be to get people's attention. It's
not surprising nonfiction authors try to feed that appetite. This
is about our addiction to the sensational.
Nawotka: Are you surprised by the amount of attention this
has gotten?
Callahan: Nobody died, was hurt or lost money -- except,
perhaps, for the cover price of the book. Nothing bad happened to
anybody, yet this has gotten more coverage than the genocide in
Sudan. It just shows you how much the media love a good scandal.
Tuesday, February 07, 2006
Lincoln's Assassin Comes to Life, Hour by Hour, in `Manhunt'
Lincoln's Assassin Comes to Life, Hour by Hour, in `Manhunt'
Feb. 7 (Bloomberg) -- The night Abraham Lincoln was shot at Ford's Theater in Washington, actress Laura Keene made a strange request: She asked to cradle the president's head in her lap.
She didn't volunteer for this macabre Pieta to offer succor. She wanted a souvenir. As Keene held Lincoln's blasted skull, ``tiny bits of gray matter oozed onto the cream silk fabric'' of her dress, writes James L. Swanson in his riveting ``Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer'' (Morrow, 448 pages, $26.95).
Keene wasn't alone in her blood lust. The next morning, an embalmer drained Lincoln's blood and poured it into glass jars, where it was ``sacredly preserved,'' the author notes in this hour-by-hour chronicle of the assassination and subsequent search for the killer, John Wilkes Booth.
Swanson's previous book, ``Lincoln's Assassins: Their Trial and Execution,'' presented a groundbreaking collection of more than 300 photos and documents from the case. ``Manhunt'' weaves that raw material into a narrative dramatic enough to be optioned for a film with Harrison Ford as Col. Everton Conger, the Civil War cavalryman who led the search for Booth.
Black Silk Lining
Thousands of books and articles have been written about the assassination of Lincoln and the hunt for Booth, including Michael Kauffman's exhaustive ``American Brutus.'' Yet none quite matches Swanson's wealth of detail, right down to the Brooks Brothers frock coat Lincoln wore the night he was shot. Embossed in the black silk lining was an American eagle, a shield of stars and strips and the motto ``One Country, One Destiny.''
Five days before the assassination, Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee had surrendered. Washington was in rapture. Booth was outraged. A renowned actor and Confederate sympathizer, Booth scorned what he saw as Lincoln's ideas of ``nigger suffrage.'' He called together three men who had earlier conspired with him on a foiled plot to kidnap Lincoln. They were Lewis Powell, David Herold and George Atzerodt.
On the morning of April 14, 1865, Booth dropped by Ford's Theater, where he learned that Lincoln would be attending a performance that night of ``Our American Cousin.'' With only eight hours to go before the performance, the conspirators set in motion a plan for simultaneous assassinations of Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William Seward.
Confederate Sympathizers
Only Booth succeeded. Atzerodt couldn't get up the nerve to kill Johnson. When Powell attacked Seward at his home, he met strong resistance, his pistol misfired and he fled. Herold, who was holding Powell's getaway horse, also bolted.
Later that night, Herold met Booth outside Washington. They stuck together for the next dozen days, on the run through the woods of Maryland and Virginia, aided by Confederate sympathizers.
The most infamous of these was Samuel Mudd, the doctor who bound Booth's tibia, broken when the actor leapt from Lincoln's theater box to the stage during his escape. Others brought supplies, including newspapers so Booth could read reviews of his ``performance assassination,'' as Swanson calls it.
Powell and Atzerodt were rooted out within a week. Booth and Herold evaded capture until April 26, 1865, when a tip led Conger and a Union Calvary regiment to a tobacco shed on a farm near Port Royal, Virginia. Herold surrendered. Booth challenged all 26 soldiers to duel and was inadvertently shot to death by an excitable young soldier named Boston Corbett.
Determined to keep Booth from becoming a folk hero, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton had the corpse photographed and hidden. Stanton also made a spectacle of the hangings of Booth's co-conspirators. Even so, sightings of Booth were reported across the country, as they are today with Elvis Presley.
Monday, February 06, 2006
A Dwarf, Jackie O., Gordon Liddy: Preview of February Books
A Dwarf, Jackie O., Gordon Liddy: Preview of February Books
Feb. 6 (Bloomberg) -- February, traditionally a slow month in publishing, still has big names in the lineup. Here is our selection of nonfiction and fiction.
Nonfiction
``Confessions of a Wall Street Analyst: A True Story of Inside Information and Corruption in the Stock Market,'' by Daniel Reingold (HarperCollins): The author's memoir of 14 years as the top telecommunications analyst at Salomon Smith Barney isn't terribly dishy, but it does offer a career blueprint for aspiring Wall Streeters on how to win influential friends and make even more influential enemies.
``Crunchy Cons,'' by Rob Dreher (Crown): The subtitle says it all ``How Birkenstocked Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners, evangelical free-range farmers, hip homeschooling mamas, right-wing nature lovers, and their diverse tribe of counterculture conservatives plan to save America (or at least the Republican Party).'' This guy isn't kidding, either.
``Fight Back: Tackling Terrorism, Liddy Style,'' by G. Gordon Liddy (St. Martins): In an odd amalgam of practical advice and conservative cant, Liddy explains everything from how explosives work to what the White House can do to protect itself from a violent mob. His last two books were bestsellers, and there's a strong suspicion that this one might be as well.
``Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy,'' by Bruce Bartlett (Doubleday): The former Reagan White House staffer attacks Bush II for his short- term political opportunism that has led to ``finger-in-the-wind'' economic leadership that has bankrupted the Republican party of its political capital.
``Last Dance: Behind the Scenes at the Final Four,'' by John Feinstein (Little, Brown): If there were a race to write the fastest book, Feinstein would have the competition lapped. Here's a guy who can compose a pair of pretty-good fly-on-the-wall sports books a year. This one, his latest since October's ``Next Man Up,'' covers the climax of the 65-team Division I NCAA men's basketball tournament.
``Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness,'' by Erik Reece (Riverhead): This Kentucky professor's expose on ``radical strip mining'' in Appalachia proves that a man can move a mountain. The book offers a detailed account of how miners removed the top of a mountain, leaving its residents -- deer, fox and songbirds -- nowhere to live.
``Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer,'' by James L. Swanson (Harper Collins): This thrilling hour-by-hour chronicle of the hunt for John Wilkes Booth has more gore than an entire season of ``CSI'' and a surfeit of detail about Booth's co-conspirators. Harrison Ford has signed on to star in the film.
``Mouthpiece: A Life in -- and Sometimes Just Outside -- the Law,'' by Edward Hayes (Broadway): This autobiography by the colorful and opinionated New York City criminal attorney, who would have been comfortable in the cast of ``Guys and Dolls,'' has enough anecdotes for a dozen episodes of ``Law and Order.''
``Preemption: A Knife That Cuts Both Ways,'' by Alan M. Dershowitz (Norton): The leftist Harvard law professor weighs in on why a foreign policy based on ``shoot first, ask questions later'' may be doing more harm than good. This book is the second in the ``Issues of Our Times'' series edited by fellow Harvardian Henry Louis Gates Jr.
``The Big Oyster: New York on the Half Shell,'' by Mark Kurlansky (Ballantine): Kurlansky hit it big with his books ``Cod'' and ``Salt'' and hopes to work the same mojo with this history of the Big Apple from 1626, when Peter Minuit bought the oyster beds off Ellis Island, to the 1920s, when the beds were finally ruined by pollution.
``The Coming Economic Collapse: How You Can Thrive When Oil Costs $200 a Barrel,'' by Stephen Leeb and Glen Strathy (Warner): The authors argue that the U.S. economy is standing on the precipice of the biggest crisis in its history and being pushed from behind as China and India rapidly expand. A few savvy Americans will be able to take advantage.
``The Judgment of Paris,'' by Ross King (Walker): The third volume of narrative art history from the bestselling author of ``Brunelleschi's Dome,'' takes on an even more esoteric topic: the Paris art scene, 1863-74, when Manet, Renoir, Monet, Degas, Cezanne and others challenged the establishment with their radical visions.
``The Oracle: The Lost Secrets and Hidden Message of Ancient Delphi,'' by William J. Broad (Penguin): A historical investigation into the temple practices that led ancient Greeks to believe the Oracle of Delphi could communicate with the gods. Broad, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, reveals that the Oracle was probably high on hallucinogenic fumes emanating from the temple floor.
``War of Nerves: Chemical Warfare from World War I to al- Qaeda,'' by Jonathan Tucker (Pantheon): Tucker, an arms-control expert, explains that armies haven't shied away from using nerve agents when they felt they were expedient -- and there's a lot more of the deadly stuff out there in nefarious hands than you might think.
Fiction
``Cleaver,'' by Tim Parks (Harvill Secker): Our eponymous protagonist is a larger-than-life newsman. Overweight and overwrought, he flees his successful career and a tangled domestic situation in search of solitude, traveling all the way to the Tyrolean Mountains before realizing that he can't escape himself.
``In the Company of the Courtesan,'' by Sarah Dunant (Random House): The British author's follow-up to the bestselling ``Birth of Venus'' features a courtesan named Fiammetta Bianchini who escapes the sack of Rome in 1527 with a stomach full of jewels and flees to Venice with her dwarf. Yes, her dwarf. Who knew the 16th century was so kinky?
``Kept,'' by D.J. Taylor (Chatto & Windus): A labyrinthine Victorian mystery by the award-winning biographer of Orwell and Thackeray. Sweeping from the Scottish highlands to the East Anglian fens and London's underworld, it promises madness, greed and obsession. There's even a train robbery.
``Lapham Rising,'' by Roger Rosenblatt (Ecco): The venerable magazine editorialist and TV commentator satirizes the development of Long Island's exclusive Hamptons area, as a reclusive writer and his talking dog try to take revenge on a multimillionaire whose new mega-home has ruined their idyll.
``Strivers Row,'' by Kevin Baker (HarperCollins): The conclusion of Baker's ``City of Fire'' trilogy about key moments in the history of New York City -- previous volumes were ``Dreamland'' and ``Paradise Alley'' -- takes place in World War II Harlem and stars Malcolm Little, the man who soon transforms himself into Malcolm X.
``The Amalgamation Polka,'' by Stephen Wright (Knopf): It has been 12 years since Wright's ``Going Native'' was hailed as a postmodern masterpiece. This new novel, about a Civil War-era abolitionist, treats the period as high farce and the war as grotesque picaresque. Love it or hate it, the novel is guaranteed to get the bookish chattering classes talking once again.
``The Brief History of the Dead,'' by Kevin Brockmeier (Pantheon): Brockmeier writes cutting-edge speculative fiction, sci-fi for the smart set. In his best book yet, a deadly virus has wiped out life on Earth and the dead gather in ``The City,'' where they subsist on the memories of the living, such as Laura, an Antarctic wildlife researcher. It's weird and quite wonderful.
``The Dublin Saga: The Rebels of Ireland,'' by Edward Rutherfurd (Doubleday): Rutherfurd concludes his two-volume fictional treatment of the history of Ireland with a novel that covers the period from 1534, as the English finally conquered the island, to 1922, when Ireland secured its independence. At 896 pages, the book averages a year every two pages.
``The Secret Memoirs of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis,'' by Ruth Francisco (St. Martin's): A fictional look into the secretive life of the former First Lady and her love affairs with the rich and powerful. Some men are soft and tender, others are simply brutes. It's pure fiction, but a potentially successful formula. We suggest Francisco take on Princess Diana as her next subject.
Friday, February 03, 2006
Perkins's `Zillionaire,' King's Zombies, a Loutish Debut: Books
Perkins's `Zillionaire,' King's Zombies, a Loutish Debut: Books
(The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of Bloomberg.)
By Edward Nawotka
Feb. 3 (Bloomberg) -- How do billionaires have sex?
The answer, judging from Tom Perkins's debut novel, is that they do it like protagonists in pulp romances: on yachts anchored off St. Barts with partners as athletic as porn stars.
Perkins should know. As a founding partner of
At age 73, Perkins has lived a full life. Kleiner Perkins has financed the likes of Google Inc. Yet he's not afraid to launch a career as a novelist with ``Sex and the Single Zillionaire'' (HarperCollins, 290 pages, $24.95), a light confection about a 62-year-old investment banker, Steven Hudson, who goes for a spin on a reality TV show called ``Trophy Bride.''
The program shows Steven dating a chorus line of willing gold diggers, including a ditzy blonde ``country girl,'' a pair of whip-wielding lesbians and an insatiable nymphet who force- feeds him Viagra. Steven yawns. This ``Lion of Wall Street'' is not easily seduced. He has his eye on the show's 39-year-old producer, Jessie James.
Perkins's crisp prose -- honed on years of crafting stock prospectuses, no doubt -- propels the story through waves of superlatives. When Steven first meets Jessie, she's described as ``startling beautiful: tall, black hair, brilliant blue eyes, and a look in her sculpted face of refinement and intrigue. Her complexion was extraordinary, her figure marvelous.''
21 Club, Gulfstream V
And so on. Nearly everyone in this book has a flawless physique. Only Steven's personal chef is, well, ``chubby.''
Throughout, Perkins catalogs the earthly delights available to the rich, from a Gulfstream V with pilots on 24-hour standby to walk-in seating at New York's 21 Club, where ``tables were more guardedly allocated than positions in heaven.''
Need we say that the rich man gets the girl?
On the other end of the spectrum stands Stephen King, the writer who drops a fly in every bowl of turtle soup. A year after watching his beloved Boston Red Sox win the 2004 World Series, King destroys the city in his icky new book, ``Cell'' (Scribner, 350 pages, $26.95).
The novel opens with a stunt. One October afternoon at exactly 3:03 p.m., a mysterious electronic pulse transforms anyone talking on a cell phone into a flesh-eating zombie.
Fluff and Guts
Clay Riddle, our hero, is standing opposite the Four Seasons Hotel in Boston when the pulse goes out. He watches as a business woman and two schoolgirls at a Mister Softee ice-cream truck devour the vendor.
Behind Clay, in a tasteless echo of what happened at New York's World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, people try to escape the zombies by jumping from buildings. A poodle gets off relatively easy when it's run down by a limo crossing Boylston Street. ``Fluff at one moment; guts at the next,'' writes King.
Clay teams up with two other ``normies,'' and they set out to walk to Clay's home in
Though King is a self-proclaimed cell-phone Luddite, he isn't above allowing his publisher to promote the book by offering a downloadable ``Pulse'' ring tone.
Unfortunately, this book turns out to be as silly as its premise. ``Cell'' offers few ideas unexplored by dozens of zombie flicks, ranking the novel as one of the least imaginative in King's increasingly inconsistent opus.
`Utterly Monkey'
Nick Laird is best known to the public as the husband of novelist Zadie Smith. His first novel is as different from ``On Beauty'' as a Mini Cooper is from a Mercedes.
``Utterly Monkey'' (HarperCollins, 368 pages, $13.95; Fourth Estate, 9.99 pounds) is a loutish-lad thriller about London lawyer Danny Simmons and his feckless childhood mate, Geordie, who arrives on Danny's doorstep with 50,000 pounds stolen from Loyalist paramilitaries back home in Northern Ireland.
Soon Danny and Geordie discover they've stumbled into a plot to bomb the Bank of England on July 12, the day when Protestant ``Orangemen'' march in Northern Ireland to commemorate the victory of William of Orange over James II in the 1690 Battle of the Boyne. Together, they try to foil the fanatics.
Laird, a former attorney who hails from
Thursday, January 26, 2006
Skin-Flick Awards, Incendiary Events and Hawaiian Lepers: Books
Skin-Flick Awards, Incendiary Events and Hawaiian Lepers: Books
Jan. 27 (Bloomberg) -- Pornographic filmmakers and starlets roll into Las Vegas each January for the Adult Video News Awards, a.k.a. the X-Rated Oscars. Staged in a ballroom jammed with surgically enhanced blondes, the event honors artists such as Stormy Daniels for her performance in ``Camp Cuddly Pines Powertool Massacre.''
David Foster Wallace attends the awards in his latest book, a collection of essays and criticism, ``Consider the Lobster'' (Little, Brown, 343 pages, $25.95; Abacus, 10.99 pounds). He comes away with a slideshow of arresting images, the most timid of which involves a G-string clad actress ``forked dorsally over the knee of a morbidly obese cell-phone retailer.''
Wallace is best known as the bandanna-capped author of ``Infinite Jest,'' a pedantic novel in which he laced characters from a tennis academy and a halfway house together with digressive footnotes and a Ph.D.-level vocabulary. Though the book showed flashes of brilliance, its 1,076 pages proved too long and too discursive for most.
A decade later, Wallace's head rag is gone. Yet his academic tricks are again on display in ``Lobster,'' which takes its name from a trip to the Maine Lobster Festival. The visit reminded Wallace of a ``Roman circus or medieval torture-fest'' as he watched lobsters by the thousands being boiled alive to sate the hunger of 100,000 tourists.
Updike and Satyriasis
Elsewhere, Wallace expertly dissects such things as why the campaign of a Republican senator, John McCain, appealed to young voters. He also picks apart authors including John Updike, whom he calls ``heterosexual to the point of satyriasis.''
Wallace is engaging and exasperating by turns; he himself says his writing can seem like ``fatuous navel-gazing.'' Only one piece here goes light on marginalia: a heartfelt recollection of sitting with church-going grandmothers in rural Illinois as they rocked in chairs and watched the World Trade Center towers collapse on a flat-panel TV on Sept. 11, 2001.
Amitav Ghosh, a peripatetic India-born novelist and journalist, witnessed those attacks from his home in nearby Brooklyn Heights. The onslaught created a ``generation gap that separates me from my children: their imagining of the world will be different from mine,'' he laments in his latest book, ``Incendiary Circumstances'' (Houghton Mifflin, 320 pages, $25).
The book offers 17 pieces of reporting spanning 30 years. Ghosh opens with the Asian tsunami of Dec. 26, 2004, showing how survivors on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands struggled to create a paper trail so they could identify themselves to banks.
`Fluttering Barrier'
``The sea took my uniform, my ration card, my service card, my tribal papers -- it took everything,'' a corporal in the Indian army says. ``I can't prove who I am.''
Ghosh also revisits India's controversial nuclear-weapon test in 1998; the start of the 1991 Gulf War; and anti-Sikh riots that killed 3,000 people in New Delhi following the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on Oct. 31, 1984.
Not content to be a witness, Ghosh helped organize a march against that rioting. At one point, women among the marchers confronted rioters by stepping forward to form a protective circle around fellow protesters.
``Their saris and kameezes became a thin, fluttering barrier,'' Ghosh writes. The act embodied Gandhi's ideal of nonviolent resistance, shaming the rioters into retreat.
This collection offers a valuable reminder that our planet is convulsed with cultural and political volatility, whether we care to watch or not.
Hawaiian Lepers
In October, President George W. Bush made the chilling suggestion that he'd consider using the military to enforce a quarantine should avian flu break out in the U.S. Before taking that step, Bush ought to read John Tayman's ``The Colony'' (Scribner, 421 pages, $27.95), a history of lepers exiled to the Hawaiian island of Molokai.
Tayman transports readers to the 1860s, when Hawaii's monarchy was haunted by a smallpox epidemic that had killed half the population of Oahu. Fearing leprosy might pose the next big health threat, the government of King Kamehameha V shipped lepers to a rocky peninsula on Molokai.
On Jan. 6, 1866, the first 12 arrived. They were given only a few shovels and axes, gray wool blankets, some salt beef, bread and two cottages. By the 1890s, the colony had swelled to 1,174 people and 423 buildings.
Deliberate Infections
``The Colony'' often reads like an adventure story, recalling hardships the lepers suffered. One horrifying chapter describes how Arthur Mouritz, the settlement's physician, experimented with healthy patients, using scalpel and hypodermic needles to infect them with ``serum brimming with leprosy bacteria.'' Tayman also documents acts of kindness administered by clergy members such as Flemish Catholic missionary Father Damien, who caught the disease and died in 1889.
The book offers medical insights into leprosy, today known as Hansen's Disease. Roughly 5 percent of the world's population is susceptible, though the incidence is higher among Hawaiians and the French. Untreated, the disease causes disfigurement. It's seldom fatal. In the 1940s, scientists developed Dapsone, a drug that keeps leprosy from reproducing and prevents disability and communicability.
Hawaii's quarantine law remained in place until 1967. Today, 28 people still live on the grounds of the colony; four survivors gave Tayman vivid first-hand accounts.
Friday, January 13, 2006
Writer James Frey to Add Author's Note to Contested Bestseller
By Edward Nawotka
Jan. 13 (Bloomberg) -- Author James Frey will add an author's note to future editions of his contested book, ``A Million Little Pieces,'' his publisher said today.
The news of the addendum was issued in an e-mailed statement by the Doubleday Books imprint of Random House, a unit of Bertelsmann AG. In an interview, Alison Rich, director of publicity for Doubleday, wouldn't comment on what the note will say.
The Web site thesmokinggun.com alleged that in the memoir the author exaggerated his run-ins with the police and the jail time he served. A story on the site said Frey fabricated his involvement in a 1986 train crash that killed two schoolmates in Michigan.
Doubleday has defended the book, which was initially submitted to publishers as a work of fiction, saying, ``The power of the overall reading experience is such that the book remains a deeply inspiring and redemptive story for millions of readers.''
Television talk show host Oprah Winfrey turned ``A Million Little Pieces'' into a publishing phenomenon when she made the memoir the selection for her book club late last year. The book subsequently sold some 1.7 million copies, according to Nielsen BookScan, and was the second-bestselling book last year in the U.S., bested only by J.K. Rowling's ``Harry Potter and the Half- Blood Prince.''
Thursday, January 12, 2006
Oprah Winfrey Defends Author Frey's `A Million Little Pieces'
Jan. 12 (Bloomberg) -- Television talk show host Oprah
Winfrey rose to the defense of author James Frey, who is alleged
by the Web site thesmokinggun.com to have manufactured portions of
his bestselling memoir ``A Million Little Pieces.''
Winfrey phoned into CNN's ``Larry King Live'' television show
Wednesday night, as Frey was reaching the end of his first
interview since thesmokinggun.com alleged on Sunday that the
author had exaggerated his run-ins with the police and the jail
time he had served.
The piece also alleged that Frey fabricated his involvement
in a 1986 train crash that killed two schoolmates in Michigan.
``What is relevant is that he was a drug addict,'' Winfrey
said, and that he ``stepped out of that history to be the man he
is today and to take that message to save other people and allow
them to save themselves.''
Winfrey waited until less than a minute before the show ended
to phone in, saying she wanted to hear what Frey himself said
before commenting. When Larry King announced that he would extend
the program for a few moments because he had Winfrey on the line,
a gasp -- from whom was unclear -- could be heard off camera.
Speaking with her trademark exasperation, Winfrey said that
she and her television producers ``support the book because we
recognize that there have been thousands and hundreds of thousands
of people who've been changed by it.'' She sounded impatient with
the controversy, calling it ``much ado about nothing.''
Publishing Phenomenon
Had Winfrey challenged, condemned or even expressed
disappointment in Frey, it could have had dramatic consequences
for his career. Winfrey turned ``A Million Little Pieces'' into a
publishing phenomenon when she made the memoir the selection for
her book club late last year.
The book has subsequently sold some 1.7 million copies,
according to Nielsen BookScan, and was the second-bestselling book
last year in the U.S., bested only by J.K. Rowling's ``Harry
Potter and the Half-Blood Prince''
During the ``Larry King Live'' show, Frey -- known to his
readers as a tattooed tough guy -- suppressed his customary
swagger. He said he had embellished some scenes in the book, yet
he defended this as a literary convention.
`Emotional Truth'
``In the memoir genre, the writer usually takes liberties,''
he said. ``The emotional truth is there.''
Frey's publisher is the Doubleday Books imprint of Random
House, a unit of Bertelsmann AG. Random House said in a statement
Wednesday that it would refund the money of anyone who purchased
the book ``directly from us,'' either over the phone or through
the company's Web site.
This represents a fraction of the more than 3 million copies
of the book sold through stores and online retailers such as
Amazon.com Inc.
It's not uncommon for memoirists to be accused of being
economical with the facts, though it's usually the author's
immediate family that takes umbrage.
The daughter of author Tony Hendra, for example, was quoted
in a 2004 interview with the New York Times as saying that her
father abused her as a child and had omitted that from his book,
``Father Joe.'' She subsequently detailed the allegations in her
own memoir, ``How to Cook Your Daughter.''
Hendra has denied the allegations.
Frey's mother, for one, is standing by her son. Lynne Frey
appeared alongside the author on ``Larry King Live,'' saying she
and her husband were disappointed that their son's book had been
attacked.
``We believe in James,'' she said, ``and we believe in the
book. The book stands on its own.''
Winfrey rose to the defense of author James Frey, who is alleged
by the Web site thesmokinggun.com to have manufactured portions of
his bestselling memoir ``A Million Little Pieces.''
Winfrey phoned into CNN's ``Larry King Live'' television show
Wednesday night, as Frey was reaching the end of his first
interview since thesmokinggun.com alleged on Sunday that the
author had exaggerated his run-ins with the police and the jail
time he had served.
The piece also alleged that Frey fabricated his involvement
in a 1986 train crash that killed two schoolmates in Michigan.
``What is relevant is that he was a drug addict,'' Winfrey
said, and that he ``stepped out of that history to be the man he
is today and to take that message to save other people and allow
them to save themselves.''
Winfrey waited until less than a minute before the show ended
to phone in, saying she wanted to hear what Frey himself said
before commenting. When Larry King announced that he would extend
the program for a few moments because he had Winfrey on the line,
a gasp -- from whom was unclear -- could be heard off camera.
Speaking with her trademark exasperation, Winfrey said that
she and her television producers ``support the book because we
recognize that there have been thousands and hundreds of thousands
of people who've been changed by it.'' She sounded impatient with
the controversy, calling it ``much ado about nothing.''
Publishing Phenomenon
Had Winfrey challenged, condemned or even expressed
disappointment in Frey, it could have had dramatic consequences
for his career. Winfrey turned ``A Million Little Pieces'' into a
publishing phenomenon when she made the memoir the selection for
her book club late last year.
The book has subsequently sold some 1.7 million copies,
according to Nielsen BookScan, and was the second-bestselling book
last year in the U.S., bested only by J.K. Rowling's ``Harry
Potter and the Half-Blood Prince''
During the ``Larry King Live'' show, Frey -- known to his
readers as a tattooed tough guy -- suppressed his customary
swagger. He said he had embellished some scenes in the book, yet
he defended this as a literary convention.
`Emotional Truth'
``In the memoir genre, the writer usually takes liberties,''
he said. ``The emotional truth is there.''
Frey's publisher is the Doubleday Books imprint of Random
House, a unit of Bertelsmann AG. Random House said in a statement
Wednesday that it would refund the money of anyone who purchased
the book ``directly from us,'' either over the phone or through
the company's Web site.
This represents a fraction of the more than 3 million copies
of the book sold through stores and online retailers such as
Amazon.com Inc.
It's not uncommon for memoirists to be accused of being
economical with the facts, though it's usually the author's
immediate family that takes umbrage.
The daughter of author Tony Hendra, for example, was quoted
in a 2004 interview with the New York Times as saying that her
father abused her as a child and had omitted that from his book,
``Father Joe.'' She subsequently detailed the allegations in her
own memoir, ``How to Cook Your Daughter.''
Hendra has denied the allegations.
Frey's mother, for one, is standing by her son. Lynne Frey
appeared alongside the author on ``Larry King Live,'' saying she
and her husband were disappointed that their son's book had been
attacked.
``We believe in James,'' she said, ``and we believe in the
book. The book stands on its own.''
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