Tony Earley: The Blue Star: A Novel
Sequel to the wonderful novel Jim the Boy. The first one, about a ten-year old in rural North Carolina in the 1930s, looked and at times read like a book for young readers, though it was beautiful and profound. This one, too. Now Jim is about to graduate high school, fall in love, and deal with a war raging in Europe and Asia.
Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela: A Human Being Died That Night: A South African Woman Confronts the Legacy of Apartheid
A member of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission undertakes a series of visits to prison to talk with the most notorious killer of the apartheid regime, to ask herself, and us: what might I have in common with someone who has come to personify evil?
Honor Moore: The Bishop's Daughter: A Memoir
Honor Moore, the poet and playwright (who I know a bit from serving on the PEN Board together) writes about her late father, Paul Moore (who I knew from Human Rights Watch work together), the Bishop of New York. The book has garnered attention, and criticism from some of Honor's eight (!) siblings and others, for "outing" her father's bisexuality, but it is in no way sensationalistic. Part autobiography, part biography, I liked it very much, and since I met Paul Moore later in his career, my admiration for him grew through his daughter's reconstruction of his transformation from a patrician child of privilege bound for Wall Street to a progressive and outspoken pastor acting and speaking on behalf of the poor and disenfranchised. It is poignant that he lived at a time when he could not also give voice to the full rein of his personhood.
State of Play (Miniseries)
Terrific BBC miniseries from 2003, a six-part political thriller with Bill Nighy, James McEvoy, Polly Walker and a great young Scottish actress (or at least she did a good Edinburgh accent) named Kelly MacDonald. I don't remember how I heard about it, but I couldn't stop watching it.
Jonny Steinberg: Sizwe's Test: A Young Man's Journey Through Africa's AIDS Epidemic
Jonny Steinberg is a South African writer who has in several books shown an amazing ability to burrow into communities not his own, gain their trust, and write about their lives and conflicts with great sensitivity. In this book -- which I read in its original South African version, Three Letter Plague, he tells the twin stories of a white AIDS clinic doctor from Doctors Without Borders and a young black entrepreneur who, for reasons of his own, declines to get tested for AIDS despite the availability of services. Steinberg is now in New York working on a book about Liberian immigrants in Staten Island.
Amy Bloom: Away: A Novel
I've always been a big fan of Amy Bloom's work, most of which is short stories about the emotional lives of educated urban and suburban types (she's a psychotherapist based in Middletown, Connecticut). This is a sprawling historical novel that ranges from Russia to Alaska (with Manhattan, Seattle and other places in between) in the early part of the 20th century, as the heroine searches for her daughter, who she hopes is the only other survivor of the pogrom that begins the book. Some find its plot over the top, but I loved it, and admired Bloom's ability to hold it all together on a canvas much vaster than her usual ones.
Wilfrid Sheed: The House That George Built: With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty
It took me a while to adjust to his style -- itself a kind of jazzy riff most of the time -- I really enjoyed Wilfred Sheed's sketches of the giants of American popular song, not just the Mount Rushmore figures of Irving Berlin, George Gershwin and Cole Porter, but Harold Arlen, Duke Ellington, Jerome Kern, Harry Warren, Jimmy Van Heusen, and Cy Coleman. It's delicious, it's delightful, it's de-lovely.
Alan Bennett: The Uncommon Reader: A Novella
Lovely short novel based on the premise that the Queen of England -- never named, I think, but obviously Elizabeth -- happens upon a library van while walking her dogs and takes out a book. Then another, and another, until her late-life passion for reading upends her life and transforms her monarchy in funny and charming ways.
Dalia Sofer: The Septembers of Shiraz
Really fine novel about a Jewish gem dealer and his family in the early days after the fall of the Shah and the rule of the mullahs in Iran. Though it is beautifully written and gripping, it seems to me more a book about families than politics, but the gem dealer's arrest and torture, and his family's eventual escape through being smuggled over the Turkish border,somehow put me in mind of the poisonous national mood in this country, today, over the treatment of prisoners and immigrants. How far we have fallen; I doubt I would have made those connections even ten years ago.
Alain De Botton: The Architecture of Happiness
Nice companion to Winifred Gallagher's recent House Thinking, though on a grander scale both of habitation and geography. His anti-Corbusier comments rival Jane Jacobs': "A city laid out on apparently rational grounds, where different specialized facilities...are separated from one another across a vast terrain connected by motorways, deprives its inhabitants of the pleasures of incidental discoveries and presupposes that we march from place to place with a sense of unflagging purpose. But whereas we may leave the house with the ostensible object of consulting a book in a library, we may nevertheless be delighted on the way by the signt of the fishmonger laying out his startled, bug-eyed catch on sheets of ice, by workmen housing patterned sofas into apartment blocks, by leaves opening up their tender green palms to the spring sunshne, or by a girl with chestnut hair and glasses reading a book at the bus stop."
Alexander Waugh: Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family
Stories about one of the most prolific writing families ever, by a fifth-generation insider. In addition to the usual stories of boarding-school cruelties and youthful gay couplings, the Waughs seem to have specialized in alternately intense or neglectful parenting -- either rank favoritism (Evelyn Waugh, whose own father made no secret of his bizarrely romantic attachment to his older brother, Alec, carried on the tradition with one of his daughters, treating the rest of his children as inconvenient disruptions.) Yet they were all quite funny, which is supposed to be redeeming.
Sweet Land - A Love Story
Lovely 2005 film by Ali Selim about immigrant famers in Southern Minnesota. Beautiful big-sky setting, but of greatest interest, beyond the developing love story, is the prejudice which greeted German newcomers -- very similar to what is faced by Mexicans in America today.
Yankev Glatshteyn: Emil and Karl
Lovely translation -- done by a friend, Jeffrey Shandler -- from a Yiddish book by Yankev Glatshteyn about two boys whose families are torn apart by the Nazis in 1940 Vienna. Though written for young people, it is a gripping and affecting read for, as they say, readers of all ages.
The House on 92nd Street (Fox Film Noir)
Saw a little blurb about this 1945 noir film in the Times when it was released on DVD a few months ago, and since I live on 92nd Street, I rented it our of neighborhood pride, though it turns out to be EAST 92nd Street. Bizarre docudrama which is almost pure FBI propaganda about catching Nazi spies in the Second World War. Many of the FBI people, including Hoover, play themselves, but are no less wooden than the actual actors like Lloyd Nolan. Not a bit of humor or irony in it.
Doris Kearns Goodwin: Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
An extraordinary read -- how Lincoln triumphed over several much better-known and connected rivals to win the 1860 Republican Presidential nomination, then put them all in the cabinet, in time winning their deep respect, admiration and loyalty. And it might well be called "Management Secrets of Abraham Lincoln" and sold on the business shelf in airport bookstores. See my post of August 9.
Phil LaMarche: American Youth: A Novel
Not a relative, though the 30-year old LaMarche, who grew up in New Hampshire and upstate New York, has the same name as my father, grandfather and actually, me (Gara being my middle name). I would have bought it just for the novelty value, but it's a gripping, spare story of an adolescent struggling with changes in himself and the world around him.
Elisabeth Sifton: The Serenity Prayer: Faith and Politics in Times of Peace and War
"God, give us the grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish one from the other." This famous 20th century prayer, used among other places in A.A. meetings, was composed during the Second World War by the author's father, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. One of the gems of this social history/memoir is the discovery, or reminding, that Morningside Heights in the 1940s was for men of the cloth like Virginia for statesmen (sorry, I'm using these non-gender neutral terms advisedly, given the times) in the late 18th century -- an amazing confluence of minds and consciences, including Niebuhr and others at Union Theological, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel of Jewish Theological Seminary, Harry Emerson Fosdick of Riverside Church, and Father Barry Ford of Corpus Christi and Columbia, all just a few blocks apart.
Nicholas Lemann: Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War
Perhaps you thought the South lost the Civil War. Think again. Nick Lemann's heartbreaking, angering and illuminating account of Reconstruction tells the story of how terrorist violence against newly-freed Blacks and their Republican allies -- kept at a "respectable" distance from Democratic leaders and met with virtual impunity from the federal government -- undid the Civil War and sapped the empowering Constitutional amendments of any meaning for nearly one hundred years.
Barry Werth: 31 Days: The Crisis That Gave Us the Government We Have Today
You wouldn't think that a day-by-day account of the first month of the Ford Adminstration would be gripping, but the account of the pardon politics that ended Ford's honeymooon actually is. Haig comes across as a snake, Rumsfeld an ambitious schemer, Cheney a sphinx, Nixon a head case, and Ford an essentially decent man. I was especially fascinated by Werth's account of the young Ford's shuttle diplomacy between his mother and his birth father, Leslie King, which he suggests provided a get-it-all-behind-you template for the Nixon pardon forty years later.
The Merv Griffin Show - 40 of the Most Interesting People of Our Time
I used to watch Merv Griffin in the late afternoons after school -- maybe he was syndicated in the late 1960's. You wouldn't think of him as a significant cultural figure -- though he has a real talent for making money, having invented Jeopardy and numerous other cash-producing shows -- but these exceprts from his interviews contain a lot of gold, with many articulate cultural icons. Orson Welles is shown in his last appearance anywhere, just a few hours before he died; Richard Burton is interviewed on a movie set in Pennsylvania, talking about the benefits of communism, while waiting for an angry Liz Taylor, who's heard he gave an expensive ring to a cocktail waitress, to show up in town.
Julia Child - The French Chef
These are a real hoot, but you also learn a lot -- why string beans should be cooked in a giant pot of ragingly boiling water, then doused with cold water, for example. For those like me more familar with the Saturday Night Live parody than the real article, these original WGBH French chef shows from the early 1960's are a revelation and a treat.
Talent Given Us: The Talent Given Us
I have a habit of making lists of books I want to read, CDs I want to own, and movies I want to see. The first two I keep track of on my Amazon.com wish list, which is why it's enormous; the movies I keep in a little notebook which over time I transfer, once they have left the theatre, to my Netflix queue. But by the time the movie arrives from Netflix I have often forgotten why I wanted to see it in the first place. So it was with The Talent Given Us, a low-budget indie film that -- I now have been able to reconstruct -- I became interested in after reading Manohla Dargis's Times review. When I popped it in the DVD player, I had no idea what to expect, and for most of it thought I was watching a reality-show type documentary, in which a late-middle-aged Upper West Side couple -- he a shambling, mumbly character, she sharp-tongued and mercurial -- decide to take a road trip, collecting two adult daughters along the way, to see their estranged son in California. Having watched it, I still don't know how much is reality and how much fiction -- the estranged son is the film's director -- but it was worth the trip. Try it.
Jeannette Walls: The Glass Castle : A Memoir
I had never heard of Jeannette Walls -- a writer and journalist who is currently an MSNBC contributor -- until this memoir of her extremely unorthodox childhood was published last year to ecstatic reviews. They were deserved. Walls and her three siblings lived a bohemian, nomadic and occasionally Dickensian existence with her parents, Rex and Rose Mary Walls. When each in turn escaped to New York -- they had pretty good coping skills thanks to having parents who virtually washed their hands of their care and feeding -- the parents eventually followed, landing up homeless. Much of this book, which chronicles the most irresponsible parenting, or lack thereof, made me angry, but Walls, while fully acknowledging her parents' deep faults, is nevertheless able with distance and grace to appreciate the good things she absorbed from these much-too-free spirits.
Ki-Duk Kim: 3-Iron
A homeless man roams the streets of Seoul leaving menu cards on the doorknobs of homes and apartments (kind of a cross between the ubiquitous Chinese menus shoved under doors in New York apartments and hotel Do Not Disturb cards), and when he returns to find them still there, he breaks in and makes himself comfortable, fixing appliances, cooking meals and taking a bath. In one home he is surprised to find he is not alone -- a woman abused by her husband is present. They form a strange Bonnie-and-Clyde relationship when she begins to join him on his rounds, eventually the husband comes back into the picture and causes problems for both. When the movie was over, I realized that neither of the main characters had uttered a word.
The Best of Youth
This 2004 Italian film is 400 minutes long, so it's a big commitment. Originally a miniseries on Italian TV, when it was released theatrically here, it was shown in two installments, and the recently-released DVD, which I got through Netflix, is on two discs. I became aware of it through its surprise appearance on a number of end-of-the-year Ten Best lists, though I had hardly met anyone who'd seen it. But now that I have, I can say it's really worth the time, and I wouldn't be surprised if, like me, you wished it to be longer. Follows a group of family and friends through about 35 years, from the 1966 Florence flood, through the Red Brigades, to the present day. A wonderful mix of politics and family, social ills and advances, personal demons and graces.
Paul Haven: Two Hot Dogs with Everything
My former nursery school student's book -- see posting at left. For 8-12 year olds and baseball fans of all ages.
Taylor Branch: At Canaan's Edge : America in the King Years, 1965-68
Still reading this gripping final volume of Taylor Branch's King biography. King remains complex and impressive; LBJ (more prominent in this one) taking great strides for civil rights (his 1965 voting rights speech to a joint session of Congress, one of the best by any President, can move you to tears) while sinking into the Vietnam mire; this book so far raises one urgent question for me: why is the name of J. Edgar Hoover, King's racist, lawless persecutor, still on a taxpayer-supported federal building?
Frederick Brosen: Still New York
With an introduction by Ric Burns. Beautiful, virtually photographic watercolors of New York buildings, some familiar landmarks, but my favorites are ordinary blocks in Chinatown or the meatpacking district. Originals are hanging in the Museum of the City of New York until February 26, if you can catch them.
Laura Pausini: Escucha
Italian pop star singing in Spanish -- apparently there's an Italian version available too. Very appealing.
Charles Peters: Five Days in Philadelphia: The Amazing "We Want Willkie!" Convention of 1940 and How It Freed FDR to Save the Western World
How Wendell Willkie, a businessman who'd never held political office, got to be FDR's opponent in the 1940 election, when the President sought a groundbreaking (and controversial) third term, and why it was important. (Because Willkie, alone among the leading Republican contenders, who also included Robert Taft, Thomas Dewey and Arthur Vandenberg, was a staunch internationalist, strengthening FDR's hand in the march toward involvement in World War II.) The 26-year-old Gerald Ford, accompanied by his girlfriend of the time, a New York model; the 15-year-old Gore Vidal, with his blind grandfather, Senator Gore; and the aged wido of President Benjamin Harrison? What do these three people have in common? They were all in the bleachers watching the action at the 1940 Republican Convention in Philadelphia.
Terry Gross: All I Did Was Ask : Conversations with Writers, Actors, Musicians, and Artists
People -- well, actually, two or three of my eleven regular readers -- have been asking me to post more book recommendations, so I am going to try, but the sad truth is I am reading less lately. Over the weekend in L.A., though, I stopped by a favorite bookstore, Book Soup on Sunset Boulevard -- which has a really good film/tv section, as you might expect -- and came across this collection of excerpts from Terry Gross Fresh Air interviews with artists of various kinds. People have been telling me about Terry Gross for years, but I have never actually listened to Fresh Air. I might start. The book, which has conversations with everyone from Albert Brooks to Mary Karr (who memorably describes men's view of foreplay as "erotic cheese and crackers") lends itself to intermittent reading -- a kind of snacking, to borrow Karr's metaphor.
Alfred Hitchcock Presents - Season One
My brother gave me this for Christmas, kind of a nostalgia trip -- though the show is as old as I am, so we must have watch it in reruns years later. My favorite episode, "Breakdown," involves Joseph Cotten as a hard-edged businessman paralyzed in a car accident and presumed dead who desperately tries to communicate to his rescuers, then to the coroner, that he is alive through the one muscle he controls -- one of his pinkies. The best treats of this series, though, are Hitchcock's droll introductions, one of the reasons he is to this day one of the few film directors with any kind of real public recognition.
Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol
The Times this Christmas morning has a piece by Dan Barry celebrating the ersatz holiday pleasures of his childhood, like spray-on snow. I have been unable to convert my children to the joys of this 1962 TV classic, which I was happy to rediscover on DVD a few years ago -- my favorite among the many renderings of "A Christmas Carol," for which I am one of the all-time suckers. If you check it out, you will find it has a fabulous Jule Styne score.
Peter Pouncey: Rules for Old Men Waiting : A Novel
Beautifully written novel, his first, by the former President of Amherst, Peter Pouncey, Dean of Columbia College when I arrived there in 1972, not that he knows me from Adam. Hope for us all.
The Dick Cavett Show - Rock Icons
When I was in high school, I watched the Dick Cavett show every night, and tried, somewhat too obviously and much less successfully, to emulate his urbanity, wit and style. I've lost track of him in recent years, but was excited to see this DVD set, which packages a number of shows in which rock stars like Janis Joplin, David Bowie and Paul Simon appeared. But the great thing about it is that, unlike the Johnny Carson "highlights" DVDs, this set gives you each show in its entirety. Cavett had an eclectic range of guests, and they all stayed the whole show for an ever-growing group conversation. So you have Sly Stone, Debbie Reynolds, Pancho Gonzales and Senator and Mrs. Fred ?Harris discussing structural racism, and Janis Joplin, Raquel Welch, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and Chet Huntley arguing over journalistic standards. A wonderful time capsule, and a sad reminder of how dumbed-down most talk shows are these days.
The Bodleian Library: Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain, 1942 : Reproduced from the original typescript, War Department, Washington, DC
I picked up this little book while browsing in Oxford. It's all over the U.K., but I haven't seen it here. This gem is a reproduction of the U.S. Army's manual advising soldiers stationed in Britain during the Second World War on the ways of their native hosts. It's respectful, informative, affectionate, admiring, sometimes funny, and still pretty much on target.
Anna Nalick: Wreck of the Day
Another 20-year old wonder, more in the Lilith Fair genre. The lead song on this debut album, "Breathe (2 a.m.)", will stay with you. Thinking of others I've put on this list in the last year or so -- Nellie McKay, Joss Stone, Jamie Cullum, etc., all college-age -- I wonder if there is any other field in the arts (not to mention elsewhere) where someone so young can make such an impact?
Ry Cooder: Chavez Ravine
Latest album from Ry Cooder is the story, in songs, of what happened to Chavez Ravine, a low-income Los Angeles neighborhood razed in the 1950's to make way for Dodger Stadium. My now 90-year old friend Frank Wilkinson is featured on the CD, both in his spoken words and in a song about him, "Don't Call Me Red." For his advocacy on behalf of public housing and the poor as a city official in L.A. in those McCarthyite days, Frank was hauled before state and Congressional anti-Communist investigating committees, lost his job, and eventually spent a year in federal prison for his unsuccessful effort to invoke not the Fifth, but the First Amendment before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Frank's spent his whole life since as a crusader against government surveillance, and only in the last year or two have mobility issues stopped him from barnstorming the country half the year. Among the many recent acknowledgments of Frank's life, this is a particularly nice one.
Sarah Vowell: Assassination Vacation
I first heard of Sarah Vowell as the voice of Violet in The Incredibles. But she has a devoted NPR following, is in the McSweeney's crowd around Dave Eggers, and has published a few books, which are now on my wishlist. This one is nearly perfect, for me. Vowell takes a tour of various sites related to the first three Presidential assassinations: Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley. Her account is fully of funny observations (including an opening rant about bed-and-breakfasts), odd and appealing diversions, and strange facts about the Presidents, their relatives and murderers. Vowell unearths the line from the play that was the last sentence heard by Lincoln before Booth, who knew it would get a big laugh, pulled the trigger in perfect actor's timing; paints a picture of President Garfield as a man who lived for the pleasures of reading; and reveals that his assassination, the famous "disgruntled office seeker" Charles J. Guiteau, lived five years in an upstate N.Y. free-love commune where he couldn't get laid.
The Be Good Tanyas: Blue Horse
My attachment to this album, a belated birthday present, is further proof, according to my daughters, that I am a 25-year old lesbian trapped in the body of a 50-year old straight man.
David Plante: American Ghosts : A Memoir
A spiritual, almost mystical journey by the author, a novelist and teacher. I was drawn to Plante's earlier Francoeur family fiction trilogy because the sagas concerned French-Canadians in New England -- my people and one of the least-chronicled ethnic groups in the U.S. I didn't realize until I read this book just how much in common we have -- though he grew up in a French-Canadian enclave in Providence and I was in an Italian-American one at the other end of the state (no Rhode Island jokes, please!) in Westerly, as adults (he's about 15 years older) we both pursued ancestral investigations that traced our roots to France in the early 17th century, where the trail then runs cold. Toward the end, his fictional self takes over and imagines bits of the lives of forbears who are just names and dates in a parish registry -- something I've been tempted to do, since before my great-grandfather, Georges Lamarche, a doctor who followed French-Canadian millworkers to western Massachusetts, I have no idea of the lives earlier generations led. They left nothing tangible behind but headstones in the cemetery.
Ronan Bennett: Havoc, in Its Third Year : A Novel
I started this British novel, kind of a detective story set in 1630's England in which the hero, a local coroner, tries to walk a line against Puritan town authorities determined to flog every drunk and hang every adulterer, the day Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline sued the state's abortion clinics to get the names of patients. So this dark but gripping book took on extra resonance. But then, the best historical novels seem contemporary. If there's a movie made of this, it could be cast with some of the new Republican Senators from the class of 2004.
Joan Silber: Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories
Recent National Book Award finalist, a collection of linked short stories, in that a minor character in one emerges as a major character in another. Linked also in a strong preoccupation with sex and religion, and in treating the sweep of a life, chronologically told in first person -- not a small slice or a series of snapshots or flashbacks. Compared in various reviews to Alice Munro or William Trevor, but the stories set in China and Italy have more in common with Andrea Barrett. I liked most of them, but what struck me strongest was the story of a curmudgeonly, aging gay dancer and teacher that seemed to me to capture the way some wounded people use sarcasm and even meanness to mask their deep hurt and longing.
Joanna Newsom: Milk-Eyed Mender
As I have learned from the reactions of those around me, this CD may not be to everyone's taste. Newsom has a very quirky voice -- think Melanie, Minnie Riperton, Mazzy Star, etc. But I like it.
Ripley's Game
As I have read everything by Patricia Highsmith (strange dark tales of amoral people for someone with my generally sunny outlook, I know), you might expect I take an interest in the few films made from her books. The best of these is still the first, Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train. But this new DVD, for some reason never theatrically released in the U.S., is a worthy contender, based on one of the later Ripley novels and featuring John Malkovich as the middle-aged protagonist. He still gets away with everything, and you still root for him to get away with it. A bit creepier and more hair-trigger violent than my image of Ripley, but a great performance and a suspenseful, violent and occasionally wryly funny movie.
Colm Toibin: The Blackwater Lightship: A Novel
Toibin, who I'd never read until this summer, has been much reviewed and talked about lately for his recent novel about Henry James, The Master. Over the summer I read The Heather Blazing, his novel about a judge's strained relations with his family, and just finished The Blackwater Lightship, also set for the most part on the Irish coast. In it, a young man, Declan, who is dying of AIDS, calls for his sister, a school principal, and she and their mother and grandmother -- three generations of strong women who are too much alike one another to get along, and who discover simultaneously that Declan is mortally sick and that his is gay -- care for him, along with two of his friends, in the grandmother's guest house on the shore. The cover says that the book is being made into a Hallmark Hall of Fame broadcast, so I was expecting something a little schmaltzy, but this often painful examination of family relations never goes for the cheap tear, and ends quietly, without dramatic events or reconciliations. Yet I found myself in tears when I closed the book.
Duane Michals: The House I Once Called Home
A lovely book: photographs, with wistful and poetic observations by the author, who returns to his childhood home in Pennsylvania, to find it decayed and overgrown. He takes pictures of the ruins and superimposes shots of family gatherings from years ago. Something very haunting and beautiful about it.
Brian Morton: A Window Across the River
A beautiful novel, by someone I've met a few times -- we have several mutual friends -- about a photographer and a writer, Isaac and Nora, who renew their romance after a five-year gap. He worries that his promise with the camera is all behind him; she can only write by exposing the flaws of those she cares about. It's knowing and moving, and at the same time full of wry observations -- never too cute or show-offy about New York intellectual life, many of which I am tempted to quote. Just one: "He'd never met Tina Brown, but like everyone else in the publishing world, he referred to her by her first name. She was like Madonna for intellectuals."
Of Morton's previous novel, the wonderful Starting Out in the Evening, in which a graduate student befriends an aging, out-of-print novelist, an Amazon reviewer wrote: "...the author quietly raises a number of questions about the utility of art, its power to inflect our dreams, and, finally, what makes a life well lived. It is to Morton's credit that he doesn't presume to answer such questions." All that applies as well to A Window Across the River.
Char Miller: Fifty Years of the Texas Observer
When I got back from Texas, this was waiting in the mail with a nice inscription from Molly Ivins that suggested it would be a good idea for George Soros to buy Diebold, the electronic voting corporation owned by the chair of Bush's Ohio campaign. ..
DAI SIJIE: Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress : A Novel
A perfectly lovely little book about two young men sent to the countryside for labor and re-education during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. They discover a valise full of serious contraband -- classic novels in Chinese translation -- which they use to captivate the villagers, charm the little seamstress, and transport themselves into other worlds.
Iris Murdoch: Under the Net
My friend Lew Perin had an inspired idea for my 50th birthday present -- he gave me original hardback editions of five novels published in the year I was born, 1954. I read the first of these. Under the Net, a few weeks ago. It was Murdoch's first novel, a comic one set in London and chronicling the adventures of Jake Donaghue, a dissipated translator reconnecting with a lost love. Her actress sister and a movie magnate/philosopher also figure in the action. No offense, Lew, but I didn't love it. I much prefer Murdoch's later, darker Gothic novels. Now I'm reading Kingsley Amis's Lord Jim, the second of the birthday books, and soon it's on to The Bridge Over the River Kwai and The Blackboard Jungle. 1954 was a good year in so many ways!
National Commission on Terrorist Attacks: The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States
I hadn't planned on buying this, but when I was in my local independent bookstore yesterday, much of the "new and noteworthy" section was devoted to stacks of them, and they were flying off the shelves. I bought one and started to read it, and instantly understood that what I have been hearing is true: it's a gripping story told in plain English -- no bureaucratese to wade through. Now I can't put it down.
Katie Melua: Call Off the Search
When I went to Amazon to get the ASIN # to add this, they said if you like this you'll like Jamie Cullum (see below) and Shelby Lynne, among others. Shows the Amazon database remains eerily prescient. I'd been hearing about her for a while, and when I went to buy the CD at Borders, I noticed cards had been placed in the Norah Jones section telling browsers that, yes, if they liked Norah Jones, go a few letters down the alphabet to Katie Melua. We are all so predictable. Particularly me, it seems. Like Cullum, like Joss Stone (some entries down), Melua is British and young (nineteen). Some covers, a few songs she wrote herself. There is a musical future, I am happy to report.
Jamie Cullum: Twentysomething
24-year old English singer/pianist who ranges from Cole Porter to Radiohead.
Maxx Barry: Jennifer Government: A Novel
I came across this in an unusual way for me -- it was on the staff picks shelf at the mystery bookstore on Greenwich Avenue in the village. It looked offbeat -- set in a not-too-distant future in which the government is so weak it has to raise money from the victims in order to conduct criminal investigations, and everyone takes the surname of the powerful corporation they work for. Hence Jennifer Government is on the trail of John Nike, whose brilliant marketing idea for a new line of sneakers is to assassinate a few purchasers in order to increase their appeal. This is hard to categorize as either mystery or science fiction. At its best, which is often, it is really a political novel about the logical consequences of what George Soros would call market fundamentalism.(Jennifer's daughter, Kate Mattel, is so named because of her school's sponsor; the curriculum includes a course on Barbie.) It's funny and ingeniously plotted, and the way it all comes together at the end brought to mind Elmore Leonard. I liked it.
Rebecca Solnit: Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities
A short, eloquent, passionate book about activism in our time -- how much it matters, what it has changed, why we should be hopeful (with surrender as the alternative). She comes out of a take-to-the-streets part of the left I have never been that comfortable with, but writes with caring, humor and a lot of common sense and wisdom, knitting things together in an unusual way. I benefitted a lot from reading it.
Nellie McKay: Get Away From Me
Debut album by 19-year old singer very hard to characterize. Some people have said she's a cross between Eminem and Dinah Shore, and they have a point.
Jack Bass: Unlikely Heroes
Terrific saga of four Deep South judges whose integrity and courage -- often at great personal cost -- is a pivotal part of the civil rights revolution of the '50s and '60s. I thought it was out of print until I read a piece by Bass in the May 3 Nation.
Herbert R. Kohl: A Grain of Poetry : How to Read Contemporary Poems and Make Them A Part of Your Life
Very accessible book by an enthusiast and non-elitist, alert to the poetry all around us.
Recent Comments