You can’t keep track of every book that gets published, right? So this
little collection of reviews is intended to rescue from obscurity some good
books you may have overlooked. Our selection method, if you want to call it
a method, is to read a lot of books and to review the ones we like, some
fiction, some non-fiction.
This isn't exactly a job; it's what we do because we like to read. And that means the list grows by fits and starts, so keep coming back, just as you would to a book store, to see what's new and to find what interests you. Go down our aisle of really good books you may have missed. Click on a title to read a review. We don't sell books but we urge you to visit your local book store or
library or an online store like
Amazon.
Here's a list of the reviews currently in our archive. Just click on a title to get to the review.
The Air We Breathe by Andrea Barrett. Once again Barrett has woven
science and story into a seamless narrative, this time with a cast of
characters in tuberculosis sanatorium in the Adirondack mountains while the
Great War rages in Europe.
Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow.
A compelling portrait of the most brilliant figure of the early republic.
Hamilton, the impoverished orphaned bastard who earned his way in the world,
believed fervently in meritocracy and worked tirelessly against slavery, is
often wrongly regarded as an elitist. Chernow’s impeccably researched
biography of the Caribbean whiz kid not only puts Hamilton back in the
American pantheon, it’s also an exceptionally engaging read.
All the Shah’s Men: An
American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror by Stephen Kinzer.
This is a concise and gripping account of the CIA plot which overthrew
Iran’s elected government in 1953. This is history that was deliberately
hidden from the American public, and we are still suffering its
consequences.
American Desert: a novel by Percival
Everett. The
newest novel from the amazingly versatile, interesting and completely
neglected writer is a very funny, yet oddly moving, satire on things
American, particularly our preoccupation with the nature of death and the
afterlife, if any.
And Give You Peace: a novel
by Jessica Treadway. A story of everyday, unremarkable people blown
out of their ordinary lives by horrific events they had no way of
anticipating.
Astonishing Splashes of Colour by Clare Morrall
An unusual first novel that brilliantly portrays a multitude of lives lived
"differently," outside the ordinary. But because, in their own way, these
lives work, they force us to broaden the boundaries of what we consider
normal.
Automated Alice by Jeff Noon.
This sci-fi Alice discovers she's not just the Alice of Alice in
Wonderland or Through the Looking Glass. She's also Automated
Alice, in Manchester, England, in the year 1998. This book is intended for
adults, especially adults who get a kick out of the old Alice books. But
it's hard to imagine smart kids not having a lot of fun with it too. This is
definitely a snark worth hunting.
Balzac and the
Little Chinese Seamstress A lovely short novel about two city boys
exiled to a mountain village at the conclusion of the Cultural Revolution.
The evocative, even magical writing gives a sense of ancient legend and,
with certain comic touches, it captures a horrendous time in Chinese
history.
The Battle for God by Karen Armstrong, a deeply informed and balanced study of religious fundamentalism.
The Beat Book by Anne Waldman.
Authoritative book by an insider about Beat poets — you like ''em or you
don't.
Behold the Many:
a novel by Lois-Ann Yamanaka. Ghosts, dysfunctional families, poverty, rape,
addiction, and tuberculosis are only part of this exuberant, over-the-top
gothic novel which takes place in gorgeously colorful 20th century Hawaii
There's no summing up this one in a phrase.
Betrayal of
Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health by Laurie Garrett. This
is a large book and surely one of the most important published on the
subject of global health —
long, informative, readable.
The Bible:
A Biography, by Karen Armstrong. Karen Armstrong writes with such
sanity, sympathy, and clarity about a subject fraught with polemical
hysteria that you almost ignore her substance because you’re appreciating
her form. No wonder she is admired by members of all three Abrahamic
faiths—Jewish, Christian, Muslim—she
discusses
their commonalities and differences with such palpable good will, all the
while applying sense and strict analysis to the discussion at hand. The author tells the life story
(to date) of the Old and the New Testament. Armstrong fears for the life of
her subject, fears that the Bible is in danger of becoming a dead letter or
“a toxic arsenal that fuels hatred and sterile polemic.” She seeks “the
development of a more compassionate hermeneutics,” one that “could provide
an important counter-narrative in our discordant world.” One can say only
amen to that.
The Big Test: The
Secret History of the American Meritocracy, by Nicholas Lemann.
This is an engaging, readable, solid book about the people who brought you
the SAT and other standard academic tests. A marvelous history.
Borrowed Finery:
A Memoir by Paula Fox. A coolly matter-of-fact, yet searing account
of the childhood. of a well-known author of children's books. The author
spares no one, including herself. This is a remarkable work by an enormously
talented writer.
Bound and Gagged:
Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America, by Laura Kipnis.
Scary stuff.
Buddha’s
Little Finger, by Victor Pelevin. A talky, absurd, comic novel of
ideas. Philosophical games may not suit every reader, but for those who
enjoy Zen absurdities, Victor Pelevin is a great find and Buddha’s Little
Finger is a lot of fun.
The Burial of the Count of Orgaz & Other Poems by Pablo Picasso,
translated by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris. A fine translation by two
poet-editors of a unique literary work. Cambridge: Exact Change
Press, 2004. 316 pages. Paperbound, $19.95. Reviewed with A Day with Picasso by Billy Kluver.
A little book of snapshots taken one sunny day in Paris showing some
of greatest artists of the twentieth century in their youth just fooling
around for the camera. And a note about Picasso the Poet, a puppet
play by Ed Atkeson.
Casanova: The Man Who
Really Loved Women by Lydia Flem, a forgiving biography of the man
who knew how to please women, a writer whose greatest creation was himself.
Cloud Chamber by
Michael Dorris, a family saga that introduces us to many more relatives of
Rayona Taylor, the prickly young mixed-blood heroine of his amazing first
novel, A Yellow Raft in Blue Water.
Cod: A Biography of the Fish That
Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky. This fish tale tells of
Gadus morhua, an
unlikely
hero who swims in the chill waters of the north Atlantic coastal shelves.
The amazing fecundity of cod, along with their durability when dried,
produced a technological breakthrough in food that changed life in Europe
for over 1000 years Kurlansky's a wise and witty writer. His book will
please you, I promise.
A Collection of
Beauties at the Height of Their Popularity: a novel by Whitney
Otto. 18th-century Japanese posters structure these deceptively simple
stories about a group of intelligent but feckless 30-somethings living in
San Francisco in the 1980s.
Confessions of Max Tivoli. by Andrew Greer. The author uses a
science fiction device—living backward—not to play logical games but to
explore the complexities of love. Max’s life intersects three times with
that of his beloved Alice, encounters that are both marvelously funny and
wrenchingly sad.
The Count of Concord
by Nicholas Delbanco. You’ve probably never heard of Benjamin Thompson. Yet
he’s a fascinating figure, a man whom President Franklin Delano Roosevelt
linked with Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin as one of the “three
greatest intellects America ever brought forth.” This same Benjamin
Thompson, born in Massachusetts in 1753, fled the country of his birth
during the Revolution and landed in England where he began working for the
British government, then later took up residence in Bavaria (where he was
made a Count of the Holy Roman Empire), becoming the same sort of pragmatic
scientist as that more democratic Benjamin, Benjamin Franklin. Here's a
fascinating fictionalized account of a fascinating real person.
The Curious
Incident of the Dog in the Night-time: a novel by Mark Haddon.
Logically gifted but deeply autistic 15-year old Christopher decides to
emulate his hero Sherlock Holmes and solve the murder of the dog Wellington.
Young Christopher emerges as an engaging, sympathetic, and often funny
character in a complicated tale of an individual with no felt understanding
of human emotions at all. Brilliant story telling.
A Day with Picasso
by Billy Kluver. Here's a little book of snapshots taken one sunny day in
Paris showing some of greatest artists of the twentieth century in their
youth just fooling around for the camera. Reviewed with
The Burial of the Count of Orgaz & Other Poems by Pablo Picasso,
translated by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris. A fine translation
by two poet-editors of a unique literary work. And a note about Picasso
the Poet, a puppet play by Ed Atkeson.
Don’t Let’s Go
to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood by Alexandra Fuller. A
complex and fascinating memoir about growing up "marshmallow" in a black
African world, that uses the superbly realized perceptions of a tough little
girl to tell a story of persistent economic struggle, relentless family
tragedy, scary guerrilla warfare, contemptible racism, and boundless love
for a stolen land.
Dreaming Maples by Claudia Ricci. This detailed, sprawling account
of three generations of women makes its impact in the gritty dramatic
collisions between fully realized characters. A remarkable debut novel, a
fresh voice. It's reviewed along with Liam’s Going.
The Dressing Station:
A Surgeon’s Chronicle of War and Medicine, by Jonathan Kaplan.
Personal stories of war, adventure, medical investigation, and documentary
film-making with reflections on life, death, and the evils wrought by greed
and politics.
Ecological
Indian: Myth and History by Shepard Krech III. Native Americans
have a checkered history in relation to the environment. Here's the full
story, the facts and the make-believe.
Einstein’s
Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time by Peter Galison. Before
Einstein and Poincaré arrived on the scene we believed that time flowed
evenly everywhere and all the clocks in the universe could stop ticking, but
time would stream on. For Poincaré (right) and Einstein (left, but you knew
that already) it was the other way around.
Here's a new look at this odd couple of scientists.
The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene. A brilliant and engaging account of the latest theories of physics.
An End to Evil: How to Win the War on
Terror by David Frum and Richard Perle. Perle is one of the
masterminds of President George W. Bush's foreign policy; and Frum is a
writer for the ultra-conservative National Review. They defend Bush's
embattled foreign policy and lay out an agenda for the future.
Unfortunately, the problems we face are enmeshed in the global web of
history, society, politics and religion. They’re not as simple and solitary
as portrayed this book..
The End of Faith
by Sam Harris. A controversial book by an author who believes that the ideal
of religious tolerance is one of the principal forces driving us toward the
abyss. If you want to pick a fight, this is a good place to start.
Erasure by Percival
Everett. An excellent, highly observant novel about family, a funny yet
trenchant novel about race, and a terrific hatchet job on publishing and the
entertainment industry.
Eucalyptus: A Novel
by Murray Bail. A different kind of adult fairy tale with clever language,
games of wit, ironic self-reflection, social commentary, and hints of
philosophy.
Expat: Women’s True Tales of Life Abroad, edited by Christina Henry
de Tessan; reviewed with
Hold the Enlightenment: More Travel, Less Bliss., by Tim Cahill.
Eyre Affair: A Novel
by Jasper Fforde An exhaustingly energetic romp that takes place in an
alternative England. The Crimean War has been slogging along for over 130
years, dirigibles carry folk around rather than airplanes, some people
engage in time travel, and everyone is deliriously obsessed with
literature. This is a double review with
Polar by T. R.
Pearson. We also have a review of another Fforde novel,
Lost in a Good
Book,
A Family Daughter
by Maile Meloy. An interesting second version that can stand by itself, of a
family history told first in Liars and Saints. Everyone’s version
of their own family story is at odds with the versions of other family
members, and that truism is even more emphatically the case when an author
writes dexterous fiction.
The Family
Diamond by Edward Schwarzschild. This wonderful collection of
stories provides real emotional, intellectual and aesthetic nourishment,
never offering simplistic resolutions to complex situations. All that plus a
touch of magic..
Fat of the Land.
Garbage of New York: The Last Two Hundred Years by Benjamin
Miller. An engrossing history of New York City’s vast garbage and trash
problem; the author has insider knowledge and a humorous, highly ironic view
of the Big Apple’s garbage management.
Fatal Passage: The Story
of John Rae, the Arctic Hero Time Forgot by Ken McGoogan. The
author sets the record straight with regard to a commonsensical man who was
arguably the greatest Arctic explorer of
the 19th century. John Rae was
"victimized by powerful contemporaries and shamefully wronged by history,"
in large part because he valued the skill and intelligence of the natives he encountered.
Exciting, informative, and infuriating, this book can also be very funny.
Rae’s prolonged search for a spouse and his ultimate reward—feisty young
Kate Thompson—will warm the heart of the chilliest skeptic. Excellent maps
and contemporary lithographs clarify where everyone went and how. It’s a
great read.
Feast of Love: a novel by Charles Baxter. The enchantment of a
summer’s night—dark, warm, filled with erotic possibilities — seduces just
about everyone.
Florence Harding: The
First Lady, the Jazz Age, and the Death of America's Most Scandalous
President, by Carl Sferrazza Anthony.
Should anyone read a 600-page book about Florence Harding,
wife of Warren Gamaliel
Harding, the President whose administration was responsible for more robbery
and rascality than any other in the history of the country? Not only is it
fascinating history, it's full of melodrama, conspiracy theories, and myriad
other curious parallels to events today. Florence Harding , like our
own Hillary Rodham Clinton, was willful, opinionated, strident, bossy, and
vindictive, but she was also widely credited, especially by herself, with
winning her husband the Presidency. This huge volume is as fascinating with
its human drama and political scandals as it is long.
Flower
Children, by Maxine Swann, is reviewed in a double review along
with
Out Stealing Horses, by Per Petterson. Both works offer tales in
which now-grown children examine the elusive past, trying to grasp just what
their unusual fathers have meant in their lives. Both Trond in Out
Stealing Horses, and Maeve in Flower Children—maintain
emotional distance and a profound objectivity about this man who preoccupies
them, while at the same time they carefully render, with rich, heartfelt
accuracy, the backdrop of the world around them.
Flu: The Story of the Great
Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It,
by Gina Kolata. This lucidly written drama teems with fascinating
characters, heart stopping experiments, professional rivalries, ethnic and
gender narrowmindedness, political errors, and lucky accidents. Great
reading.
Foreign Babes
in Beijing: Behind the Scenes of a New China by Rachel Dewoskin. A
deliciously entertaining true story of an American girl, newly graduated
from college, who goes to Beijing to work and finds herself acting the part
of a foreign temptress in a Chinese TV soap opera. The account contains
quite a few meaty chunks of serious information along with the hilarious
doings.
The Fourth
Treasure: a novel by Todd Shimoda. Illustrations by L. J. C.
Shimoda. Elegant design, stunning illustration and curious marginalia
combine with a complex, intriguing story to provide a total aesthetic
experience.
The
Fox Woman by Kij Johnson. This is in a double review with
The
Testament of Yves Gundron. These first novels are exceptional
examples of highly imaginative, fantasy story telling. There's no good way
to summarize two such fanciful tales in a sentence, so take a look at the
review.
Galileo's
Daughter :A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love by Dava Sobel.
This is a handsomely designed book, but a tale this fascinating should not
lack so desperately in drama and excitement. We recommend the book despite
its flaws because there's a great story here.
A
General Theory of Love by Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard
Lannon. A fascinating book which makes complex advances in brain science
easily accessible to ordinary readers — written with literary grace and
flair.
Gilead,
by Marilynne Robinson. The
fictional memoir an elderly Christian minister who must come to grips with
how an individual is to live rightly, especially since we are faced with the
fact that when we die, we leave "the forgetful world behind us to trample,
and mar and misplace everything we ever cared for." Readers of
this fine book may be interested to read our review of Marilynne Robinson's
Home,
a novel which engages the same characters as Gilead, but from a
different point of view.
Glass,
Paper, Beans: Revelations on the Nature and Value of Ordinary Things
by Leah Hager Cohen. A quirky exploration of how glass or a cup of coffee
or a newspaper comes into being — odd, digressive, absorbing.
Globalization and its Discontents by Joseph E. Stiglitz. An
astonishing indictment of the United States’ role directing globalization.
The author — a Nobel Prize winner, the former vice president and chief
economist of the World Bank and a former chairman of the President's Council
of Economic Advisors — gives a damning analysis of the way the United States
Treasury and the International Monetary Fund inadvertently ruined some of
the world's economies.
Golden Ratio
by Mario Livio. An entertaining book about Phi, "the world’s most
astonishing number." The Golden Ratio is 1.61803… and you don't have to be
a mathematician to enjoy this one.
Grand
Complication: A Novel by Allen Kurzweil. A young reference
librarian is at the center of this bright, comically complex and thoroughly
captivating novel. This is a mystery story, but what makes it fun to read is
the authors nimble wit and his delight in everything, including the Dewey
Decimal system.
The Great Fire,
Shirley Hazzard’s first novel in 20 years, is a truly magisterial work by a
great writer about the inconceivable devastations of war and the potentially
saving grace of love. Although the story is filled with death, suffering,
blighted hope, blackened ruin, and terrible evil, nonetheless piercing
through are amazingly moving springs of green life. “Many had died,” writes
Hazzard, “but not she, not he; not yet.”
The
Hakawati. By Rabih Alameddine. If you like good stories and good
storytellers, then you should read Rabih Alameddine. He's the real thing, a
natural-born hakawati, or storyteller. His novel of the same name
is a rollicking succession of stories nested in stories nested in other
stories—some real, some imaginary, all true, all fiction. Alameddine puts
Scheherazade to shame, poor girl.
Heaven Lake: a
novel by John Dalton. A young American college graduate volunteers
to spread the Christian gospel in contemporary Taiwan, only to find himself
totally out of his depth culturally and spiritually and emotionally. A
funny, horrifying, marvelous story.
Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to
Genocide by Branimir Anzulovic. Myths and sacred stories about holy
ground, manifest destiny and promises from heaven about real estate -- these
give people the right and obligation to kill with the smug satisfaction of
doing God’s work. We should be more careful of what we worship. An
informative and powerful book.
History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage.
Beer,
wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and Coca Cola—each "the defining drink
during a pivotal historical period, from antiquity to the present day."
What you drink says a lot about who you are and what you're planning
to do during and after that drink. Beer for a buzz with your buddies, wine
with good food and amiable conversation, coffee to get your mind in gear. An
amusing and instructive book.
Hold the Enlightenment: More Travel, Less Bliss.by Tim Cahill;
reviewed with
Expat: Women’s True Tales of Life Abroad, edited by Christina Henry
de Tessan.
Hole in the Universe: How Scientists Peered over the Edge of Emptiness and
Found Everything by K. C. Cole. A book about the concept of
nothing, a playful romp through Einstein’s spacetime, quantum fields, black
holes, string theory, and even the much-lambasted, ever-reappearing ether.
This is not only a delight for amateurs of science, but also an engaging
book for people who are curious about scientific concepts but too afraid to
ask. Check out the author's
The Universe and the Teacup: The Mathematics of
Truth and Beauty for the same kind of writing.
Home,
by Marilynne Robinson. “Talk to each other, for heaven’s sake!” you want to
scream at the smothered characters in, Marilynne Robinson’s infuriating
novel, as they hesitantly tiptoe around the walls surrounding all the
feelings, desires, and experiences that matter to them. You can get so
annoyed with everyone that you finally don’t care whether they arrive at any
resolutions or not. This is particularly frustrating because in Home,
Robinson has taken a second look at the people and stories that made up her
glorious and popular novel of three years earlier,
Gilead,
which we've also reviewed.
How Race is Lived in America: Pulling Together, Pulling Apart by
Correspondents of The New York Times. Exceptionally various and utterly
fascinating stories of racial cooperation and racial strain as experienced
by real people in real situations.
Hungry Planet: What the World Eats by Peter Menzel and Faith
D’Aluisio. A more-than-coffee-table book that explores in lively text and
sumptuous photography the food consumed each week by thirty families around
the globe--from the suburbs of Australia to refugee camps in Chad, from the
icecap of Arctic Greenland to bullet-pocked Sarajevo.
The Idea
of Perfection: a novel by Kate Grenville. This tale of
imperfections brings together what must surely be the most awkward couple
ever to appear in fiction. This richly comic Australian novel won Britain’s
prestigious Orange Prize in 2001, and deserves a broad American readership.
The In-Between World of Vikram Lall by M. G. Vassanji, a
multilayered tale of life in Kenya’s Indian community, starting in the
murderous Mau Mau years of the 1950s, through the heady possibilities of
Independence, and into the Cold War morass of corruption and collapse.
In
Defense of Food. by Michael Pollan. The author offers us terrific
advice about eating and at the same time he’s wonderfully entertaining to
read, and he says such sane things in such plain language. It’s truly
heartening to read such simple, sane, and enthusiastic reflections on how we
can return food to its proper role in culture, enjoyment, and health.
In Sunlight, in a Beautiful Garden: a novel by Kathleen Cambor.
This account of the devastating Johnstown Flood of 1889, which killed over
2,000 people, is crowded with fascinating stories, some true and some
fictional. In fact, several of Pittsburgh’s wealthiest industrialists bought
memberships in an exclusive mountain camp on the shore of an enormous lake, an artificial creation
held in place by what was then the world’s largest earthen dam. The workers
lived in the valley below the damn
The Indian Clerk: A Novel
by By David Leavitt. This fictional rendering of real-life Indian
mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan—who was brought to England in 1914 —
provides a penetrating account of social class, of how Cambridge University
operated at that time, of homosexuality in the intellectual classes, and of
how the Great War profoundly changed life in England. But even more
impressively, it maps great gulfs of cultural and emotional ignorance, all
the while dramatizing the disasters such ignorance generates..
Intertwined Lives: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Their Circle
by Lois W. Banner. Two highly regarded 20th-century social
scientists, Ruth
Benedict and Margaret Mead, substantially influenced the new field of
anthropology, and their completely accessible writing reached a broad
popular audience. Both women married, and both, it turns out, had a number
of male and female lovers, including each other. Intertwined Lives, says
about what Benedict and Mead were doing as well as what they were writing.
This remarkable book, based on hitherto unavailable papers, examines the
complex sexual relations of these unusual women as well as the times in
which they lived
In the Hands of the Great Spirit: The 20,000-Year History of American
Indians by Jake Page. A lucid, witty overview of the first
appearance of humans in the New World -- who they were, their role in the
disappearance of the continent’s megafauna, the effect of European diseases,
the relationship of Indians to their environment, and that between American
Indians and the United States, a thoughtful and engaging book.
Island of the Mapmaker's Wife & Other Tales, by Marilyn Sides.
Stories about love and passion where trivia in the world around us become
the agents of arousal and desire.
Isaac
Newton by James Gleick. The author has sifted through a zillion
words written by and about this unsociable genius and put his findings into
a beautifully compact little volume. Isaac Newton was a scientist the equal
of Galileo or Einstein and a mathematician the equal of any other, and it
may surprise readers to learn he was also deeply interested in alchemy and
the Holy Trinity. This fine little book is not so much a biography
of Newton as it is a study of his testy character and the turbulent times in
which he lived. A gem.
The
Jane Austen Book Club: a novel by Karen Joy Fowler. Regardless of
your sex, if you're a reader you'll find this is masterful high comedy with
utterly sure, witty writing. Five contemporary women and a man get together
every month to talk about Jane Austen, but most of the novel concerns their
own lives, which travel roads laid out long ago by Austen.
Kafka on the Shore
by Haruki Murakami. Murakami is the intellectual reader’s manga author. His
works are filled with a strange mixture of Japanese and western cultural
influences where cool,dislocated characters are nonetheless unabashedly
romantic or become obsessively absorbed in daunting spiritual quests. Kafka
on the Shore is no exception.
King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial
Africa, by Adam Hochschild. We can bear to read this horrific
history because the author does such an excellent job of describing the
extraordinary personalities and lives of his protagonists. Reviewed with
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver.
Krakatoa:
The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883, by Simon Winchester.
About the volcano which spectacularly blew itself apart in 1883, killing
over 35,000 people. European colonial presence and the advance of
communications technology (telegraph, undersea cable) made this natural
catastrophe a global media event, and it's all here in Winchester's book.
Last Things:
a novel by Jenny Offill. Seven-year-old Grace chronicles the fascinating,
funny, energetic, but ultimately tragic devolution of her mother from comic
eccentricity into madness. And, by the way, this book demonstrates why
certain novels make more interesting reading than many memoirs do.
Liam’s Going by Michael Joyce is a sensitive depiction of the
emotional wrenching that parents undergo as they send a beloved child out
into the world. It's reviewed along with Dreaming Maples by Claudia
Ricci.
Life
Class, Pat Barker’s new novel, brings together her major fictional
concerns—sex and its ambiguities, random horrific violence, the condition of
women, the British class system, World War I, and (sometimes) love—and molds
them ultimately into a meditation on art.
Little Green Men by Christopher Buckley is a wild social and
political satire. Jack Banion, the central character, is a colossally
self-important public-affairs talk-show host who is abducted by aliens and
subjected to humiliating physical examination. His outraged reaction flushes
his career and his marriage down the drain. Reviewed with Meeting
Luciano.
A Long Way Gone
by Ishmael Beah. This remarkable memoir presents Ishmael Beah’s harrowing
but highly nuanced story of being a boy child soldier in Sierra Leone, who
by sheer luck and the affection of a commander managed to survive to be
rehabilitated and ultimately to come to the United States.
Lost
in a Good Book: A Thursday Next Novel by Jasper Fforde. Thursday Next,
the intrepid SpecOps Literary Detective introduced in The Eyre Affair, once
again zips through time, novels, and an alternative England. A blend of
Lewis Carroll, Douglas Adams, Kurt Vonnegut, and Monty Python that pleases
the reader more often than not.
The
Lost Painting by Jonathan Harr. Here's the true
story of a quest to
find a lost masterpiece, namely Caravaggio's painting of the dramatic moment
when Christ, betrayed by Judas, is seized by armored guards. The search for
this painting – a search which involved dedicated scholarship, guesswork and
plain luck – makes a fascinating tale. And though the story is intricate (as
a mystery should be) the author's cinematic style makes this a very easy
read.
Yes, yes, we know this list is getting long.
And, yes, maybe we should divide it into fiction and non-fiction. But
where's the fun in that? The reason we have this web site is so you can poke
around in it, see what it has to offer in the way of reading, the same as
you would look around in a library. Ever been away from home and it's
raining outside and you're stuck in a room with the half dozen books on the
solitary book shelf? And of the six books one is a dictionary, one is a
cookbook and another is a Nancy Drew mystery? Better too many than too few.
And the list keeps growing.
The
Magician’s Study: A Guided Tour of the Life, Times, and Memorabilia of
Robert "The Great" Rouncival by Tobias Seamon, seduces you into a
world of strange and passionate people who make what is often a tawdry,
gimcrack magic. But sometimes amidst the sleight of hand and fakery,
something sinister or astonishing, even miraculous, happens.
Mammoth Cheese: a novel, by Sheri Holman. Eleven babies born to a
poor mother on fertility treatment and a 1,200 pound cheese are the focal
points of Sheri Holman’s richly descriptive novel The Mammoth Cheese
is a satirical tour de force inhabited by surprisingly serious individuals
and suffused with thoughtful insights.
The Maytrees by Annie
Dillard. Dillard's story about two young people on the tip end of Cape Cod
falling in love, marrying, having a baby, splitting over infidelity, etc.
etc., bears a greater resemblance to the author’s poetry, her essays on
nature, and her speculations on meaning than it does to your typical novel.
We may barely count as objects in the universe, Dillard says, but we count
nonetheless, especially to each other.
Measuring the
World, by Daniel Kehlmann, is a deft, ironic, often funny, always insightful tale that plays off against each other
the life stories of two
famous Germans—the mathematician-astronomer-physicist Carl Friedrich
Gauss (on the left) and the great naturalist-explorer Alexander von Humboldt
(on the right). This is biography of an unusual sort, since these parallel
tales are told in a style that occasionally passes from straight forward
prose to the fanciful and surrealistic.
Meeting Luciano. by Anna Esaki-Smith uses quiet humor to tell the
story of a Japanese woman living in Westchester, whose fixation on opera and
its megastar Luciano Pavarotti helps repair her life and that of her younger
daughter. Though humorous, Meeting Luciano is a far more serious
book than Little Green Men with which is shares a review.
Mendel's Dwarf: A Novel.
by Simon Mawer. A comic novel for the intellect.
Middle East Books An annotated selection of half a dozen books
about the political turmoil in the Middle East, including a brief overview
of some editions of the Koran.
A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History
of the Penis by David M. Friedman. The main thrust—all diction
becomes difficult when discussing this topic—of the author’s argument
focuses not on the independence of the penis but on cultural interpretations
of it. Friedman does a handsome job on racism, colonialism, and the penis,
as well as devoting a funny concise chapter to Sigmund Freud, whose
recognition of "the psychic and historic potency of the penis" the author
compares with Saint Augustine’s. When Friedman arrives at contemporary
feminism, he finds himself in the company of women who totally agree that
culture defines the penis although he and they disagree regarding
interpretations.
Mister Pip, by
Lloyd Jones, tells the story of the last white man remaining on a small
Pacific island during a vicious little civil war and how his approach to
teaching—principally reading Great Expectations aloud—ignites the
imagination of the novel’s thirteen-year-old narrator, Matilda.
Molecules of Emotion by
Candace Pert. In a world where everyone suspects that our thoughts and feelings deeply affect
our bodies, but no one knows just how, Candace Pert, Ph.D., has come up
with some provocative suggestions. A fascinating book on a fascinating
subject.
Money: Who
Has How Much and Why by Andrew
Hacker is a compact and lucid
account of the ways our society apportions its riches. America is not only
the richest nation of its kind; it’s also the one with the greatest
inequality in the distribution of those riches.
Mummies of Urumchi by Elizabeth Wayland Barber, a fascinating
scientific detective story. In the 1980s Chinese archaeologists uncovered a
grave site at Cherchen containing several 3,500-year-old bodies. What
everyone noticed immediately was that these bodies were clearly Caucasoid,
not Chinese or Mongoloid. Moreover, the man and one woman were well over six
feet tall. Who were these people? Where had they come from? How had they
managed to live in this exceedingly daunting environment?
My Dearest Friend: Letters of Abigail and John Adams Edited by
Margaret A. Hogan and C. James Taylor. John and Abigail wrote over a
thousand letters to each other. In this meticulously edited selection we
discover a loving family man, extraordinarily intelligent and ambitious,
frustrated, filled with wrath and envy and, at last, contented with his
place in life. We also discover the remarkable Abigail, an astonishingly
capable woman, the brilliant and devoted companion of our second president.
My Name
is Red: a novel by Orhan Pamuk., translated from the Turkish by
Erdag M. Goknar. A historical murder-mystery-love story-philosophical
treatise set in 16th century Istanbul. A brilliant tour de force of story
and style.
Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia. By Orlando Figes.
NY: Henry Holt and Company, 2002. 729 pages. $35. Between Heaven and
Hell: The Story of a Thousand Years of Artistic Life in Russia. By W.
Bruce Lincoln. NY: Viking, 1998. 525 pages. $34.95. The Icon and the
Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture. By James H. Billington.
NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966. 819 pages. Paper $22. This is an extensive and
detailed review primarily of Natashs's Dance, along with a more general
review of the other two works. It's well worth reading.
The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crises of 2008 and What
it Means by George Soros. The author, a billionaire, former hedge
fund manager and global philanthropist, has ideas about the way financial
markets work - for instance, that markets don't always tend toward
equilibrium and that we never know enough about markets to predict their
future. This is common sense book from a very uncommon financial wizard.
Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan poses the big question: since
people eat just about anything, what are we eating these days and is it safe
and wholesome? To answer this question he explores four meals, one made from
items in the “industrial food chain” (what most of us eat from most of the
time), one from the organically grown industrial food chain, one from
locally grown organic food on a farm in Virginia, and one that he literally
hunts and gathers himself A double review with Twinkie, Deconstructed.
Out
Stealing Horses, by Per Petterson, is reviewed in a double review
along with Flower
Children, by Maxine Swann. Both works offer tales in which
now-grown children examine the elusive past, trying to grasp just what their
unusual fathers have meant in their lives. Both Trond in Out Stealing
Horses, and Maeve in Flower Children—maintain emotional
distance and a profound objectivity about this man who preoccupies them,
while at the same time they carefully render, with rich, heartfelt accuracy,
the backdrop of the world around them.
Paradise Fever: Growing
Up in the Shadow of the New Age by
Ptolemy Tompkins. A semi-comic memoir about growing
up in a psychedelic world of New Age theories and individual crackpots.
Funny but true.
Perfect Heresy: The Revolutionary Life and Death of the Medieval Cathars
by Stephen O’Shea. In the 13th -century Pope Innocent III incited a group of
impoverished nobles from northern France to extirpate the Cathar heresy. A
tale of violent thought control, the destruction of a kind of
multiculturalism, the operations of greed— a fascinating page of history.
Pirate of Exquisite Mind: Explorer, Naturalist, and Buccaneer: The Life of
William Dampier by Diana and Michael Preston. Dampier’s
fascinating
life, which included three trips around the globe, produced a treasure trove
of scientific information and his meticulous hydrographic observations were
indispensable to the English Navy. Darwin constantly referred to his careful
descriptions of flora and fauna, and few writers prior to the 20th century
matched Dampier’s dispassionate descriptions of newly encountered peoples.
This real-life pirate was a restless, curious, enormously intelligent and
observant man who was also unusually tolerant and open-minded for his time.
Playing in the Light, a novel by Zoë Wicomb, tells the story of a
colored South African couple who determined to escape their racial
classification and pass for white, and what happened when their daughter,
living now in the post apartheid era, began to explore her background.
Poetry of the Universe by Robert Osserman,
is a brilliant little
non-fiction book about the shape of the cosmos. Osserman pretends to tell a
guileless tale about the difficulty of making maps, but along the way he
mentions a little bit of this and a little bit of that. By the end of the
story the reader has effortlessly taken the steps necessary to understand
that if he traveled far enough outward, say to the edge of the cosmos, he
might at last come to that place where he could look further out into the
heart of the place he left behind.
Poisonwood Bible: A Novel by Barbara Kingsolver. The author
dissects the undead corpse of colonialism through the reactions of her
narrators, Orleanna Price and her daughters. Both girls struggle to learn
the tonalities of the local language and eventually comprehend that the word
their father uses to describe Jesus as "most precious" can also mean "most
insufferable" or "poisonwood." Reviewed with King Leopold's Ghost.
Polar by T. R. Pearson. Southern storytelling gone haywire. The
energy of the author’s relentless voice, his perfect ear for dialect, and
his immensely fertile invention will stun most readers into stumbling along
after him. This is a double review with The Eyre Affair, a
novel by Jasper Fforde.
Pompeii,
a novel by Robert Harris. A marvelous thriller. The hero, an engineer no
less, tries to solve several mysteries and survive the famous eruption of
Mt. Vesuvius in A.D. 79. And the true heroine is the lovely Roman aqueduct
that's our hero's responsibility, not that silly girl.
Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language by John McWhorter.
This is written for the non-specialist and all you need to enjoy it is a
knowledge of English and an ordinary amount of curiosity. One of the best
books on the subject in a long time.
The Republic of Dreams by
G. Garfield Crimmins. A popup book for adults, a work of graphic delights.
A Spot of Bother by Mark
Haddon. This time Haddon opts for a realistic family drama, awash with
humorous irony, but sitting over an abyss of bleakness, an excellent follow
up to his
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, far better than your
average tragicomic British dysfunctional family story.
The
Testament of Yves Gundron. This is in a double review with
The Fox
Woman. These first novels are exceptional examples of highly
imaginative, fantasy sstory telling. There's no good way to summarize two
such fanciful tales in a sentence, so take a look at the review.
A Thousand Years of Good
Prayers: stories, by Yiyun Li. These masterful stories take place in
burgeoning, post-Mao, capitalist China where even children drag forward
pasts that are unimaginably different from the present, while at the same
time they try to fathom age-old cultural norms that have become horribly
twisted during the revolutionary era
Tubman - Three biographies of Harriet Tubman --
Harriet
Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories. By Jean M. Humez. Madison:
Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman: Portrait of an American Hero.
By Kate Clifford Larson. and Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom.
By Catherine Clinton. These biographies dramatizes a renewed interest in
Tubman’s contributions to our national history, but they also draws
attention to the complications surrounding the former slave who left no
written record of her own.
Twinkie, Deconstructed, by Steve Ettlinger, takes apart that
quintessential manufactured snack cake, the Twinkie, ingredient by
ingredient—right down to the polysorbate 60. We get to know everything about
what its parts are, where they come from, and how they are processed.
Reviewed with Omnivore's Dilemma.
Universe and the Teacup: The Mathematics of Truth and Beauty by K.
C. Cole. Terrific, even for literary types who think they don't like math.
The author is an expert at making difficult concepts understandable and, in
fact, interesting and engaging. And check out the author's
The
Hole in the Universe: How Scientists Peered over the Edge of Emptiness and
Found Everything for the same kind of writing.
Wakefield,
by Andrei Codrescu. A novel of self-discovery which uncovers the wonderful,
confused, self-contradictory soul of this country. Codrescu is an
intellectual with a sense of humor - an unlikely but rewarding
contradiction.
War and
Peace., by Leo Tolstoy. This is a new translation by Pevear and
Volokhonsky, and these translators are simply
terrific at their job. As for
the novel itself — well, what can we say? It's
simply one of the best novels ever written. War and Peace is an
extraordinary book, the pinnacle of Tolstoy’s writing, however much he came
to hate it in his later life. He realizes all his characters through dead-on
accuracy of detail, such as old countess Rostov accepting the gift of a
miniature of her beloved dead husband indifferently “because she did not
feel like weeping now.” At the same time he orchestrates an enormous cast of
characters in a complicated dance of authentic life that takes your breath
away.
What
Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception, by Scott McClellan. McClellan, President Bush’s press secretary, depicts the forces Driving the White House and the ambiance of secrecy and lies in which the administration worked. The author provides a behind-the-scenes look at the "permanent campaign" which doesn't end on election day but continues to manipulate public opinion from from the Oval Office.
In McClellan’s view, the greatest campaign of George W. Bush’s career was
not his run for the presidency, but his campaign to invade Iraq.
The
Woman Who Waited by Andre Makine who once delineates a time—the
1970s—and a place—a nearly abandoned village in northern Russia near the
White Sea—with lyric precision in a story of a jaded young man from
Leningrad who despite his corrosive cynicism falls in love with an unusual
woman old enough to be his mother.
Bacon's Essays, a golden oldie from 1632
Stamp out starving writers! Buy their books! We urge you to visit your local book store. However, if you get a craving for a book at, say, 3:00 A.M., and you discover that your local book store is closed, we suggest you visit Amazon.com. They probably won't have the book pictured above, but they do have an awful lot of others.