Redmond
O'Hanlon's Trawler: A Journey Through the North
Atlantic
"For
O’Hanlon, at least, the trawlerman’s
journey is largely about running nets through deep,
hidden places within himself. Doubtless, a book
about the sea’s abysmal depths would have
been compelling, but this one certainly has its
delicious moments of comedy and existential terror."
Top
Stella
Rimington's At Risk
"At
Risk has an impressive hook for readers who
prefer their thrillers to be quick, intense and
above all realistic: it was written by Stella Rimington,
who joined Britain’s Secret Service (MI5)
in 1969 and served as its director general from
1992 to 1996.
Top
Thomas
Fahy's Night Visions
Thomas
Fahy’s debut thriller has nearly enough
momentum to stave off a reader’s growing
concern that the plot might not be as strong as
it promises in the early pages.
Top
Carl
Hiaasen's Skinny Dip
No
one will ever accuse Carl Hiaasen of being a subtle
novelist. He paints his satires with broad, broad
strokes. But no one will accuse him of being boring
or slow, either. Skinny Dip, his eleventh
novel, is true to form.
Top
John
Gimlette's At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig:
Travels Through Paraguay
To borrow from
Voltaire, if magical realism didn’t exist,
Paraguay would invent it. Only it would be even
darker and more nightmarish than what we have
on the shelves today.
Top
Joe
Eszterhas's Hollywood Animal
"If
Eszterhas had given his readers simply this childhood
memoir, it would have been a powerful little book,
and it would have helped replace the boorish,
misogynistic role he’s perceived as playing
with some of his louder screenplays."
Top
François
Bizot's The Gate
"Wordsworth
famously described poetry as the overflowing of
emotion recollected in moments of tranquillity.
Bizot certainly waited long enough to recount
his ordeals in a Khmer Rouge prison camp, but
by his own account, the tranquility will never
come."
Top
Thomas
Sanchez's King Bongo
"Squeezed
into a short multi-plot summary, King Bongo
certainly sounds familiar. But its settings, characters
and thematic development keep it fresh."
Top
Re-Thinking
Nabokov
"Nabokov
is often trounced as an intellectual snob, a literary
mandarin. With his complex plots and prose that
draws on French, English and Russian (just to
name three), he delights in laying traps for the
unwary reader because he wants to prove his superiority.
So the argument runs. In truth, as Boyd demonstrates,
Nabokov is the most charitable of authors. He
always gives the reader more than one path to
his destination. In Nabokov’s teaching days,
Boyd relates, he told his students: 'Curiously
enough, one cannot read a book; one can only reread
it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and
creative reader is a rereader.'"
Top
Patricia
Carlon's Who Are You, Linda Kondrick?
"Every
time I pick up a new Carlon title I tell myself
to slow down and savor the experience—but
I can't. Her prose is so expertly lean and fast
that I consume the book in a single night, and
then I spend a year waiting for the next one."
Top
Caedmon
Spoken-Word Recordings Go Digital
"This
year, Caedmon celebrates its fiftieth anniversary,
and in addition to releasing new recordings of
classic literature (like Philip K. Dick's The
Minority Report and Other Stories, read by
Keir Dullea), it continues to digitalize its backlist.
Arthur Miller, Charles Bukowski, Ernest Hemingway,
James Joyce and Edgar Allan Poe are among the
classic writers who have made it onto CDs, and
the list is growing."
Top
Rich Cohen's
Lake Effect
"Lake
Effect is about the friendship of young men
when girls are desired but still unfathomable
objects, about bonds forged in cheap beer and
borrowed cars and aimless adventures and talk
late into the night, when it all feels important
and exciting in some way you can't quite define
and you can't imagine ever wanting any of it to
change. And then it all changes, until there's
nothing left of it but old stories you can't quite
explain to your wife and in-jokes you no longer
understand scrawled in your high school yearbook."
Top
Ben Marcus's
Notable American Women
"Imagine
a Mandelbrot pattern with its endlessly magnifying
geometric complexities and you get some of Notable
American Women's frenetic, hyperreal obsessiveness.
And like a Mandelbrot pattern--and opposed to,
say, an Antrim novel--the real focus here (both
yours and Marcus's) seems to rest on the hallucinatory
kaleidoscope of images, rather than the storyline
itself."
Top
Henry
Petroski's Paperboy: Confessions of a Future
Engineer
"The
author of books such as The Pencil and
The Evolution of Useful Things, Petroski
has a gift for rendering the ordinary in unexpectedly
intriguing detail. Very large sections of Paperboy
are devoted to the finer points of newspaper delivery,
such as the range of techniques evolved to accommodate
thick papers, thin papers, and Sunday papers with
their stack of supplements. It's the sort of matter
you might never otherwise have given a second
thought to, like the million other components
of everyday living, but once you've learned about
it, you can't imagine why you never wondered about
it before."
Top
Pagan Kennedy's
Black Livingstone: A True Tale of Adventure
in the Nineteenth-Century Congo
Black
Livingstone is by
turns an adventure story and a sobering look at
both American and European history, as well as
a biography of a man who managed, in his own largely
non-political way, to fight the darkest tendencies
of his time. It's a remarkable story, notable
not only for its thrilling sense of adventure
but for the fact that it's so little known today.
Kennedy's fascination with Sheppard's story and
her affection for him as a dynamic, complicated
figure are apparent—and infectious.
Top
T.R. Pearson's
Polar
Ordinarily,
we would expect the foreground—the main characters
and the central plot—to be favored over the
background in a successful novel. Indeed, it would
defy the notions of 'primary' and 'secondary' to
invert their roles in a novel. And yet that's precisely
what T.R. Pearson has done in his latest novel,
Polar—and the effects, counterintuitively,
are shockingly entertaining.
Top
Paul Bowles's
The Stories of Paul Bowles
Paul
Bowles has finally received what a writer of his
stature deserves: a complete collection of his short
fiction, stretching from his first often brilliant
efforts in 1946 to his last, occasionally didactic
work in 1993. Ecco's new The Stories of Paul
Bowles is especially valuable to Bowles enthusiasts
because it offers stories that have never been collected
before. And since the stories (sixty-two in all)
are presented in chronological order, we can watch
Bowles establish and refine his central themes as
well as witness how his notion of the form changed
over nearly fifty years.
Top
Carl Hiaasen's
Basket Case
Basket Case's plot
isn't as convoluted as Hiaasen's last novel, Sick
Puppy. Where Sick Puppy was high farce,
Basket Case is a more traditional murder
mystery offering the standard genre-driven elements
(femme fatale, etc.) as well as some nicely
broad comic highlights (this is Hiaasen, after all).
Unfortunately, that means it lacks some of Sick
Puppy's speed and dizzying changes of direction
(traits at which Hiaasen excels). On the other hand,
it doesn't lack for zany comic antics, particularly
when it comes to comically absurd violence (another
Hiaasen trademark).
Top
Nancy Milford's
Savage Beauty:
The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay
The shock value of
a woman talking openly and even callously about
sexuality is lost on us today. Years ago, Madonna
taught us that women's underwear can be outerwear,
and Britney Spears's efforts to make lurid Lolitas
mainstream get edgier with each music awards show.
Cunningly composed poetry just won't cut the mustard
with us, these days. But Milford apparently likes
a tough sell when it comes to biographical subjects.
Her Zelda: A Biography jump-started critical
and popular interest in F. Scott Fitzgerald's artistic
but troubled wife, and I suppose she hoped to perform
the same task for Millay with Savage Beauty.
Top
Edna
St. Vincent Millay's The Selected Poetry of
Edna St. Vincent Millay
The fact that her
poetic style was conventional and easily understood
by the average reader (in ways that many of her
modernist contemporaries were not) certainly helped
sales, but it's always sex that moves the books,
right? And Millay, whose audience included an emerging
generation of freethinking women, was really like
a waggish, crossdressing Metaphysical poet in her
approach to love and sex.
Top
Allan Gurganus's
The Practical Heart
For
all its abundant stylistic variety, Allan Gurganus's
The Practical Heart: Four Novellas has a
single gesture, if not theme, at its center: in
each story, a character (usually middle-aged) looks
back at the past and mulls over its effect on him
/ her in the present. When, if not where, that past
lies is only a part of this superb collection's
creative diversity.
Top
Bobbie Ann
Mason's Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail
Despite the
characters' unhappiness (or perhaps because of it),
Mason's stories here are beautifully kinetic. Characters
wonder through snow storms and escape their dull
lives by catching a bus to a Mississippi casino
'boat.' The movement—'zigzagging down a wild
trail'—mirrors the character's unsettled states
of mind, of course, but it also makes for some fast
reading. And the comedy in Mason's stories tends
to sneak up on you delightfully too.
Top
Joan Didion's
Political Fictions
It's not Didion's fault,
of course, if her subjects are depressing. In fact,
this collection demonstrates that Didion is quite
simply one of America's best essay writers, with
a keen eye for detail and a knack for dogged deconstructive
analysis—to say nothing of her writing style.
Her elaborate sentence structures (she's particularly
enamored of sentence-stretching parenthetical points)
often read like intoxicating acrobatic maneuvers,
and the points she makes with them are so carefully
developed that one often feels they should be read
purely for the pleasure of watching them work, no
matter how depressing the subject.
Top
Katie Roiphe's
Still She Haunts Me
The strongest character
in Roiphe's book is, fittingly, Alice herself: the
object of Dodgson's desires (whatever their form)
and, by extension, ours. Roiphe's work with Alice
is particularly distinguished by the complexity
of her character development. Alice is no mere victim
of Dodgson's illicit desires; she is, even when
she first appears in the novel as a four year old,
fully cognizant of both the way people see her and
the way she can manipulate her own image for their
benefit (or shock).
Top
Salman
Rushdie's Fury
Fury's protagonist
has to carry more than his relatively uninteresting
character can handle. He's too passive—often,
he's simply a keen observer with a backstory—and
it weakens the novel's narrative thrust considerably.
At one point, Rushdie writes, "This about New
York Solanka liked a lot—this sense of being
crowded out by other people's stories, of walking
like a phantom through a city that was in the middle
of a story which didn't need him as a character."
The reader can't help thinking that Solanka himself
often seems crowded out of his own novel.
Top
At its most intriguing
moments, Taylor's biography raises a series of profoundly
compelling, if troubling, questions: what form would
Fitzgerald's fiction have taken without Zelda as
his model? What might have become of their lives
if Fitzgerald had taken doctors' advice and stopped
drinking? What might Zelda have achieved if Fitzgerald
had not so thoroughly blunted her own struggle for
creative expression?
Top
Many contemporary
readers may initially find Bragg's writing voice
to be a bit sentimental. In fact, it's not. He simply
explores—and shows—deeply felt, sincere
emotions, and what might strike some of us today
as sentimentality is actually Bragg's complete lack
of postmodern irony. Irony might be today's chosen
voice, but so much of Bragg—not just his subject
matter, but him—belongs to the past.
And I can't imagine someone doing a better, more
noble service to the past than Bragg does here.
Top
Again and again,
Bragg's stories evoke an unsettling, abiding feeling
that the world—especially today—isn't
as stable or as changeless as we would like. None
of us are shielded from sudden, catastrophic violence
or government-sanctioned or economy-driven loss
of freedom. Our fates, in short, are not always
of our own making, and Bragg excels at reminding
us of this frightening fact.
Top
James Tate's
Memoir of the Hawk
Some of these
poems make me think of automatic writing, as
if Tate were watching his hand curiously to
see what it would write next. Salvador Dali
might have liked these poems. (In fact, Tate,
like the great surrealist, seems intrigued with
spiders; in "Hotel of the Golden Dawn,"
an entire hotel is populated with arachnids
that keep the flies off a guests' eggs in the
morning.)
Top
Elizabeth
George's A Traitor to Memory
George's deeper themes—of
memory's frailties, of the lies we tell ourselves
to make life more palpable, and, perhaps most
importantly, of the enduring bonds that sustain
dysfunctional families—are admirable, and
they suggest George is hunting for big game here.
That doesn't mean the book is flawless, though.
Top
Patricia
Carlon's Death by Demonstration
Why Patricia Carlon,
the Australian master of psychological suspense,
has not seen her mysteries adapted to the screen
is...well, a mystery. Given how close she is in
tone and technique to Hitchcock, I can't fathom
why filmmakers have passed over her for so long.
Death by Demonstration probably won't find
itself on the top of many producers' project wish
lists, though.
Top
Charles
Gallenkamp's Dragon Hunter: Roy Chapman Andrews
and the Central Asiatic Expeditions
As a biographer, Gallenkamp
wisely avoids what he calls "unfounded psychological
analysis" on the grounds that an adventurer
like Andrews had little interest in philosophical
ponderings or soulful introspection. Surely, Andrews
could have been cracked open by a diligent therapist
willing to follow Andrews around and poke at him
with probing questions (his fear of water is particularly
tantalizing), but the chances of performing such
maneuvers now, given Andrews's taciturn record,
are slim. Besides, one has to wonder whether all
biographical subjects are rendered more complicated
by denying they are truly as focused on their stated
goals as they seem.
Top
Peter
Nichols's A Voyage for Madmen
As the race progresses
into the seemingly impassable Southern Ocean, Nichols's
text takes on an ominous quality of encroaching
doom. "The further I go," one yachtsman
writes in his logbook, "the madder this race
seems." Shrieking gales and eighty-foot waves
aside, though, the most compelling material may
be the shocker that comes two-thirds of the way
through the book: one of the contestants decides
to fake his journey and meticulously maps out his
feigned, record-breaking progress, which he reports
by radio daily to a thrilled audience back home.
Top
Haruki
Murakami's Sputnik Sweetheart
Sputnik Sweetheart's
metamorphosis theme is pure Kafka, but I think Murakami's
philosophical interests lean as much to the great
magical realist, Julio Cortázar: the solidity
of self is not merely questioned but nullified,
and the world into which the self formerly settled
cozily becomes a barren desertscape worthy of Antonioni
(who adapted Cortázar's short story, "Blow-Up,"
of course: it's a small ontological world).
Top
Haruki
Murakami's Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack
and the Japanese Psyche
One thinks, reflexively,
of Shiva Naipaul's account of the Jonestown cult
suicide (Journey to Nowhere), but Underground
is better, I think, both as an account of cult aberrations
and literary-level reportage. It's a fascinating,
if harrowing, account which has questions of fate
and, to paraphrase Frost, the train car not taken
at its center.
Top
Richard
Bernstein's Ultimate Journey
A reader casually stumbling
onto Richard Bernstein's Ultimate Journey,
in which Bernstein follows the path of a seventh-century
Buddhist monk from China to southern India, might
be forgiven for expecting the book to have an overtly
spiritual purpose. After all, the monk set out on
his five thousand mile journey along the Silk Road
with the purpose of finding the Ultimate Truth of
Buddhism. But the reader's casual assumption, reasonable
at face value, would be wrong.
Top
Peter Martin's
A Life of James Boswell
Let's face it: moving from
a damning portrait of debauchery to a sad portrait
of sexual addiction and morbidity is really a matter
of shading and interpretative insights. By my count,
Martin lists seventeen separate gonorrheal infections
for Boswell, and a man who expends himself on a
prostitute four times in a single night certainly
couldn't be termed chaste. On the other hand, Martin
certainly seems right to favor the 'complicated'
interpretation of Boswell's carnal excesses: they
suggest more a man in psychological turmoil than
they do a simple, carefree hedonist.
Top
John Banville's
Eclipse
Banville has written
twelve books now to great critical acclaim, but
widespread popular success has inexplicably eluded
him. I don't know that Eclipse will change
that; I can only say that I hope it will. He is
truly one of the most sophisticated, subtle novelists
working today, and it's nothing short of embarrassing
to see the money going to the legal thrillers while
the only works likely to survive the distance go
sinfully underappreciated in their authors' prime.
Top
Michael
Dibdin's Thanksgiving
Michael Dibdin has
already established a sterling critical reputation
as a mystery novelist, and he brings to Thanksgiving
the speed and efficiency of a no-nonsense mystery
writer who understands how to let his story progress
through quick, adept dialogue. Dibdin's pace is
fast without seeming relentless, and the effect—cinematic,
really—is whoppingly pleasurable.
Top
Dave Eggers's
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
I mostly liked this book,
though now of course I have to say what I didn't
like in order to prove that I am not a swinish slave
to popular taste, or trying to curry favor with
Dave Eggers. So okay. The word "fuck,"
along with its various derivatives and near-relatives,
was used more than I thought strictly necessary;
like the red chili sauce on the table at the Vietnamese
restaurant, a little "fuck" goes a long
way, though both are a matter of taste.
Top
Julian
Barnes's Love, etc.
Love, etc.'s
darker developments may disturb readers who enjoyed
the light, witty comedy of Talking It Over
(to which it is a sequel), but it's undeniably a
work whose deeper themes merit our attention, and
Barnes's cunning (if not exactly playful) presentation
of them is, as always, refreshingly adept.
Top
Amy Tan's The
Bonesetter's Daughter
LuLing's story—of
a childhood spent first with her Precious Aunt and
then in an orphanage during the Japanese invasion
that preceded World War Two and finally her immigration
to America—is engaging in itself, but it's
her character's jarring transformation that most
impresses the reader.
Top
Madison Smartt
Bell's Master of the Crossroads
While Master of the
Crossroads can be read alone, Bell's intentions
are so clearly epic—combined, the first two
volumes run to over twelve hundred pages—that
the trilogy begs our close and complete attention.
These are stunningly good, dense novels of lasting
importance, and as far as I can see, they achieve
everything they set out to accomplish.
Top
John S.
Littell's French Impressions: The Adventures
of an American Family
French Impressions
is a very funny book in many parts, as Mary struggles
to hold together family and home with two small
children and a bare grasp of the most rudimentary
French. I don't know if this book would be as entertaining
to a reader with no experience of travel with children,
but it is a welcome addition to the ranks of the
literature of wandering, a genre where children
are largely conspicuous by their absence.
Top
John Updike's
Licks of Love
While "Rabbit Remembered"
is arguably long enough to have been published on
its own, Updike seems determined to collect and
bind everything but his grocery lists, and he throws
in twelve short stories to accompany "Rabbit
Remembered." Frankly, he shouldn't have, if
only because some readers will be so unmoved by
them they may not read their way through to "Rabbit
Remembered."
Top
Angela Bourke's
The Burning of Bridget Cleary: A True Story
In the extended passages
where Bourke establishes the principal characters
and reconstructs the moments surrounding Bridget's
murder and burial, The Burning of Bridget Cleary
reads like a well-paced suspense thriller. But Bourke
is clearly up to something much more profound and
complicated. She's an expert on the Irish oral tradition,
and she does brilliant work deciphering the minutiae
about fairy belief that is vital to understanding
the Bridget Cleary case.
Top
M. Lee
Goff's A Fly for the Prosecution
Unfortunately, Goff plays
it straight, and who can blame him? The man's a
legitimate scientist and wants to be taken seriously
and not thought to be making wit at the expense
of the dead. The result, however, is a book that
skips quickly over the icky stuff and the backstory
on the bodies and instead spends a great deal of
time on rather dry technical laboratory details
with first instars and Berlese funnels and soil
fauna.
Top
Ted Koppel's
Off Camera: Private Thoughts Made Public
While he doesn't clarify
his stances by listing his political party affiliations,
it's readily clear that Koppel isn't exactly proud
of Bill Clinton's personal behavior in the White
House, has great misgivings about the way American
foreign policy is conducted today and is generally
unhappy about the direction America took in the
last years of the second millennium. But Koppel
reserves some of his greatest ire for his own medium,
network news.
Top
Dava Sobel's
Galileo's Daughter
In stepping away from the
familiar track of the Galileo narrative—man
of science versus power-mad Church—to bring
to life the lifelong devotion between daughter and
father, Sobel's book becomes finally, unexpectedly,
and most pleasurably, a love story.
Top
Robert Drewe's
The Shark Net
The serial killer Eric
Cooke's presence in Robert Drewe's new memoir certainly
isn't gratuitous: Cooke killed one of Drewe's friends
and was a Dunlop employee who sometimes made deliveries
to the Drewe house. Indeed, one marvels at first
that Drewe doesn't give Cooke more space in his
text. But Drewe is up to something far more subtle
with the Cooke material.
Top
Stephen King's
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
After publishing bestsellers
for more than a quarter of a century, Stephen King
is ready to let us in on the secret of his success.
Ready? There is no secret. A lot of reading,
a lot of writing, and knowing his gerunds from his
participials (as well as obsessively pulling up
adverbial weeds as they sprout) is the key to his
success. Disappointed? (And you thought it was going
to be so easy....)
Top
Alan Lightman's
The Diagnosis
The Diagnosis is
by turns a grimly black comedy and a bleak cautionary
tale. But it is also, in the end, simply an immensely
moving, sad story, particularly when Lightman shows
Chalmers's brightly burning love for his son, Alex.
The cautionary aspects of The Diagnosis may
make it necessary reading; its tragic elements—our
caring for Chalmers as a human—make it almost
unbearably haunting.
Top
Penelope
Evans's First Fruits and Freezing
The skill with which
Evans lays out her clues in First Fruits and
twists Kate's voice to show her profound underlying
vulnerabilities is astonishing: it's patient, intelligent
and even fugue-like in its subtle complexities.
It's impossible to anticipate where Evans will take
the plot, although the basic images and thematic
issues are laid openly before us—which is
a stunning achievement in itself.
Top
Mary E.
Wilkins Freeman's A New England Nun and Other
Stories
'Regionalist' shouldn't
of necessity be a pejorative term that implies primitivism
or merely an historical intention to capture 'local
color.' Freeman's stories often achieve something
quietly profound that lifts them above the domain
of local color into that more rarified plane of
universal values, but they often do it with
rather than despite the languid, beautifully
described, lazy quality of her fictional country
world.
Top
Patricia
Carlon's The Unquiet Night and The
Price of an Orphan
It's one of the publishing
industry's odd mysteries that Patricia Carlon's
superb psychological thrillers had to wait more
than thirty years to be published in America. She
has been compared—justifiably—to such
masters of the genre as Alfred Hitchcock and Patricia
Highsmith, and yet despite her having written more
than fifty novels and being translated into seven
languages, until Soho Press began publishing her
work four years ago, she was entirely unknown to
most Americans.
Top
Edmund White's
The Married Man
The Married Man
picks up its pace and sense of urgency in the final
one hundred pages, where, as the lovers travel to
Morocco for a final trip together, White's writing
becomes so beautifully sad that it's almost too
painful to read at times. Strangely, while reading
these pages, I found myself thinking of Catherine
and Frederick Henry's flight from the war in A
Farewell to Arms. Both couples are fleeing death—hopelessly,
of course—and trying to find a quiet respite
of love, but it's such an odd, unexpected comparison
that I won't belabor it.
Top
Charles
Baxter's The Feast of Love
Isolated as individual
voices, Baxter's characters appear inarticulate
on the subject of love. But read together, they
begin to define it surprisingly well, albeit indirectly.
Through the diverse, conflicting stories about love
and its various forms—sexual, self-reflected,
paternal, maternal—we seem to get a greater
understanding of the need for love and even perhaps
something of its form(s). Ironically, for a novel
that begins and ends in darkness, Baxter suggests
the Platonic source of love is, at least metaphorically,
light.
Top
Jan Dalley's
Diana Mosley
On a personal level, Jan
Dalley's new biography of Diana Mosley certainly
expands our understanding of the Mitford family.
But it's far more powerful as a cultural history
of a remarkably diverse period, from the hedonistic
1920s through fascism's heyday in the 1930s and
the worldwide reckoning that followed. And Diana
seems to be the perfect biographical subject for
such a history.
Top
Kevin
Patterson's The Water in Between: A Journey
at Sea
A cynic might point out
that Patterson's book puncturing the myths of travel
and adventure literature is being pitched, somewhat
inaccurately, by its publisher as "a high seas
adventure story." And the liberal sprinkling
of technical lingo—mizzen masts and whisker
poles and port forestays and halyards—might
leave landlubbers wishing for a glossary. What makes
the book succeed, however, is Patterson's strong,
insightful writing and his humor, much of it at
his own expense. If I had to spend months at sea
in a small boat, Kevin Patterson is the kind of
travelling companion I'd hope to have.
Top
Jamie
Zeppa's Beyond the Sky and the Earth: A Journey
into Bhutan
If Zeppa followed her story's
most obvious narrative trajectory, her book would
have all the makings of a Hollywood movie and not
much more. But Zeppa allows reality to intrude its
complexities and contradictions on the story. There
is a suffocating lack of privacy in her Bhutanese
village, and the burden of social disapproval. There
is little questioning of authority. There is a growing
civil unrest between northern and southern Bhutanese,
argued only in rhetoric and rumor. And a world without
VCRs and Calvin Klein is also a world without clean
water and sanitation, where children die of easily
preventable diseases.
Top
Louis
Auchincloss's Woodrow Wilson
"For all the tragic
potential, it's the revealing glimpses Auchincloss
gives us of a Wilson at odds with the popularly
conceived, remote, coldly rational figure that might
move, even surprise, many readers. Can you imagine
Wilson, whom Henry Adams once described as "a
mysterious, a rather Olympian personage and shrouded
in darkness from which issue occasional thunderbolts,"
entertaining house guests with such comic impersonations
as 'the drunken man staggering about with a cowlike
look in his eyes, the heavy Englishman with an insufferably
superior accent and an invisible monocle, the villain
done with a scowl and a dragging foot'?"
Top
Michael
Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost
Anil's
Ghost almost feels like a thriller at times
with its ferociously addictive pull, but Ondaatje
is up to far more complex things here than most
thrillers pursue: complex themes; sophisticated,
extended backstories; and—perhaps most importantly—a
supreme attention to the artistic weight of each
sentence as an end in itself. Ondaatje (who has
published more books of poetry than he has fiction)
writes with an understated concision, moving with
a stunning smoothness between the past and the present
and breaking his chapters up into smaller sections
that seem to balance and hover over the text with
a magical, poetic glow.
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