The Internet Review of Books

Fiction

Take me back to Nashville

WHERE ALL THE DEAD LIE
By J. T. Ellison
368 pp. Mira Books

Reviewed by Diane Diekman

Where All the Dead Lie is J.T. Ellison's seventh crime thriller featuring the exploits of Taylor Jackson, a homicide lieutenant in Nashville, Tennessee. When the story opens, Taylor is recovering from a bullet wound to the head, which caused her to lose her voice. She suffers from guilt for failing to prevent the torture of her best friend, Samantha, and the murder of Sam's unborn child. With her return to the police force contingent upon professional counseling, Taylor accepts an offer from a London detective and widowed friend, “Memphis” Highsmythe, to visit his ancestral home in the Scottish Highlands.

Memphis tells her, “One of my dearest friends is a celebrated psychologist. You can stay at the estate, she can drop in for your visits, and you can get a break.” Taylor wants an escape from Nashville, to somewhere she “wouldn't be expected to speak if she were alone. No one to look over her shoulder, check on her every movement, look at her with doubt.” But the romantic castle turns menacing as Taylor's sense of isolation grows, and she doesn't know whether she is haunted by ghosts or hunted by the living. Is the psychologist really the friend she seems to be? Is the housekeeper's solicitousness genuine? Did Memphis's wife actually commit suicide?

Unfortunately, much of Where All the Dead Lie is a rehash of Ellison's previous novel, So Close the Hand of Death. The reader is forced to imagine Taylor's showdown with a serial killer called The Pretender. The author introduces the backstory through Taylor's thoughts: “…the hardwood floor, covered in dust that tickled her nose, the beating of her heart, so loud, so close, the blackness she knew was blood covering her eyes. Her blood. Baldwin screaming. Sam bleeding, the Pretender crumpled in a heap just inches from her, his eyes open, staring into hers as she struggled, and failed to maintain consciousness.”

Reading Where All the Dead Lie made me feel like coming in during the middle of the story. I spent the whole time trying to catch up on what I'd missed, with limited success. I'm not sure The Pretender actually died, or if he might reappear in a future book. There is also a flashback to an argument with Taylor's fiancé, Baldwin, for lying to her about having a son. That resolution is probably the plot for later in the series. It's a mere mention in this one. The current and past stories are told through the viewpoint of several characters, and the plot device of providing information through their thoughts gets old.

The Nashville setting is what attracted me several years ago to Ellison's debut novel, All the Pretty Girls, where Taylor Jackson and her associates were introduced. I enjoyed that story and was disappointed to learn Where All the Dead Lie didn't also take place in Nashville. The Scottish setting was, however, well researched and described. Ellison, who lives in Nashville and researches extensively with local law enforcement, made two trips to Scotland while writing this book.

I'd be willing to read Ellison's next offering if it has a stand-alone plot and is set in Nashville. Or perhaps the Taylor Jackson story has run out of steam.

Drunken Angel

2012-02-23T09:00:00.000-05:00

Nonfiction

A testament to the human spirit

DRUNKEN ANGEL
By Alan Kaufman
463 pp. Viva | Cleis

Reviewed by Tim Elhajj

Drunken Angel is Alan Kaufman's memoir about his descent into alcoholism and his subsequent recovery by using the methods found in 12-step programs. He describes a difficult childhood in the Bronx with his mother who was a Holocaust survivor given to erratic behavior, and his distant, working-class father, whose most lasting gift to his son may have been a penchant for sadomasochistic pornography.

Kaufman's life is a whirlwind of moves to follow. He moves to Israel, claims citizenship, and serves in the Israeli Defense Force, where he acquires post traumatic stress disorder, which further aggravates his already conspicuous alcoholism. As a young man, he is a womanizer and adulterer and makes no bones about his behavior, serving up the goods on himself with candor and wit. He is accepted into Columbia University and publishes a book, but all his accomplishments seem to come to naught while he continues to drink.

At close to 500 pages, the book is a testament to an entire life given over to alcohol: first the descent, Kaufman firmly in the grips of the drink, and then the ensuing rise from ruin. This type of memoir can often feel predictable, but what makes Kaufman's stand out is the passion with which he throws himself into recovery. When he stops drinking, he sends himself into an orbit around alcohol as rigorous as anything done by a down-on-his-luck alcoholic to get another drink--only Kaufman isn't drinking anymore. He is attending meetings, helping other alcoholics, or calling on one of his kooky AA sponsors. Kaufman is an unabashed 12-step believer. In a less talented writer's hands, a work like this might have come off like testimonial, but Kaufman is an amazing writer who really nails the recovery milieu. His work reminds me of Harry Crews, who famously presented on the page the poverty stricken deep South of his own childhood. What Crews did for depression-era Georgia sharecroppers, Kaufman does for people recovering in 12-step programs. Drunken Angel tells in pitch-perfect language and tone what recovery from alcoholism by going to 12-step meetings is like.

Kaufman has a great capacity to surprise and delight. Early in his recovery, he finds himself in a bus station, essentially homeless, where he meets up with an elderly homeless woman who is mentally ill. He allows the passage to turn itself into a searing meditation on American values and homelessness, which I quite enjoyed. Kaufman has a good sense for the big picture. He uses his own experience of destitution not to merely shock us or cajole our sympathies, but to give us a sense for where we all stand in relation to those less fortunate than ourselves. For as high-minded as all that sounds, I was also disappointed in parts, mostly with the depiction of Kaufman's ex-wife whose presentation feels somewhat shrill and two-dimensional. He uses hyphens in most of her quoted speech--for what reason it's hard say--perhaps to give one the sense that she's a braying donkey. This woman is guilty of some terrible crimes against Kaufman--including spiriting his daughter to another country-- but the conscientious memoirist knows that his job is to deliver the story, and the story can only be delivered with fully articulated, well-rounded characters. It's a small blemish on an otherwise fine memoir, a testament to the human spirit and will to survive.

Ghost Light

2012-02-20T09:00:00.000-05:00

Fiction

Seeing innocence or ferocity

GHOST LIGHT
By Joseph O'Connor
246 pp. Picador

Reviewed by Dennis C. Rizzo

In this world of nano-prose, flash fiction and media bytes, commitment to read an engaging literary tome may cause one's friends to suggest professional help. However retro this may at first feel, Ghost Light builds a mosaic of characters and emotions to levels lost in most modern fiction. Yet, to avoid it because of its florid style would be to lose the opportunity to see writing in full form.

Reflecting on the past lives of great people requires a degree of familiarity with those people. Joseph O'Connor demonstrates this in this richly woven study of stage actress Molly Allgood's unbridled relationship with renowned Irish playwright Edmund John Millington Synge. That he refers to it expressly as 'A Novel' indicates some pliant use of the facts, which is deftly done without compromise.

The writing is a bit of thick cherry trifle, layered with pudding and liquor and sponge cake. O'Connor brings the reader deep into the past of Molly through her reflections as an old woman in postwar London.

Thus he tells the story in the manner in which most of us reflect upon our past, as a folio of emotional experiences rather than simply as a memoir:

Not long after dawn. The shadow kissing time. Grey light at the window and the whistle of the kettle as you move about, failing to keep warm. Mittens flittered to ribbons. You wear a dead man's boots. Well, no point in wastefulness. A sin. Down below in Brickfields Terrace, a milk wagon is delivering. You wonder would the man advance you another month's credit but the fear of being declined dissuades you.

Molly ponders whether to sell her last remaining love letter from John Synge to a collector. Maire O'Neill (her stage name) then emerges, the remainder of the book being reviews and critiques of how she played out her own life.

O'Connor takes liberties. The chapters pop and switch among time periods, thoughts, and subject matter - sometimes a recollection, sometimes a description of one of the many play rehearsals in which Molly and John participated:

No holy well or hermitage is allowed to remain unpoked-at. They traipse up and down the Sugarloaf until she can tell all the sheep apart. A pity love is not measured in worn-out soles; if it were, she would be a married woman by now.

Throughout, O'Connor weaves a panorama of colorful scenes, detailed mini-dramas, and impassioned dialogue into heady reminiscences. He brings the reader into the daily life and strife of Synge and Allgood, giving them flesh and blood. In their first holiday free of his aristocratic family and the prying eyes of ultraconservative Ireland, she begins to see innocence where before she had seen only brilliant ferocity:

The room smells of linseed and musty old linen that wasn't allowed to dry properly after laundering. On the mantles shelf is a black candle that has no wick, and he looks at it curiously and hefts it in his hand. She has to tell him it is a cake of furniture polish.

O'Connor's parents were avid supporters of the arts. His early immersion in classical literature and theater is clear in his steady and seemingly effortless use of flowing, lyrical descriptions:

The grey-green sea rolled slowly on the strand, sucking stones in its wake, fizzing lowly on the grits, and a seal popped its head through one of the slopping breakers like a surfacing merman in a folk tale.

Molly's last thoughts are of her years with Synge, who dies at age thirty-eight from Hodgkin's Disease. Synge is best remembered for his role in establishing the Irish National Theater Society. His most famous piece is Playboy of the Western World, in which he is believed to have written the principal female role expressly for Allgood. The first, passionate love of her life remains seared into her consciousness and emerges throughout her final days as she plays out her regrets and imagines his:

A strange morning indeed. Another sip of the brandy. And the queerest sensation of the many besetting you now is that someone else is composing the day and everything in it. A faraway sentiency has been shaping and sifting, trying somehow to atone and to put matters right. For you. For itself. To edit away its failures.

The story frequently requires the reader to work at absorbing images and emotions. O'Connor could have said what he wanted to say in less than several hundred words, but then the poetry of the work would be lost.

Readers may look upon this as the most recent iteration of a well-honed and historic Irish literary style, or they may view it as blarney. Either way, O'Connor carries it off well. It is neither presumptuous nor cavalier. It is simply his style. Readers will love it or hate it, but will never be uninspired.

Tuesday Night Miracles

2012-02-16T09:00:00.000-05:00

Fiction

A brisk walk on a cold day

TUESDAY NIGHT MIRACLES
By Kris Radish
483 pp. Bantam Books

Reviewed by Ann Hite

Choosing Tuesday Night Miracles and settling in for a serious read is like taking a long, brisk walk on a crisp, cold day. This novel revived me and pulled me into the lives of characters with problems many of us can relate to. Not since How To Make An American Quilt by Whitney Otto have I been so interested in a group of women and their stories.

This is a novel about anger and the miracle of empowerment after finding one's true voice. There is a fine line between anger and bad choices, and all of Radish's characters cross it.

Dr. Olivia Bayer is a therapist closing in on retirement without truly taking a risk in her profession. With secrets of her own, she steps out in her free-spirited way and takes the lives of four women into her hands.

Jane is young, beautiful, trendy, and washed up as a top real estate sales professional in Chicago. Her career has been ruined by the economy, but she is married to an engineer whose continued success causes her plenty of angst and envy. Because she has allowed her life to be defined by both her mother's unrealistic standards and perfectionist traits, she has no substance or depth and holds people at arm's length. Her friends fall to the wayside. One morning, as she gets ready to close the deal that will save her career, she directs years of pent-up self-loathing at an unsuspecting victim.
Kit, in her fifties, takes care of her dying mother and one night she snaps in a fit of overwhelming anger. She comes from a traditional Italian family, where the men are the bosses and the women lack a voice. Kit's husband works double shifts and is never home. Her grown daughter has fled the family and never calls. Once in her life she had friends, a good job, and some happiness. She's forgotten what her dreams were. Now there is only a void.
Grace is a nurse and a single mother of two daughters. One is a rebellious teenager and the other is a college student who reveals a life Grace can only push out of her thoughts. She loses herself in caring for others, so much so that she no longer knows what she truly wants. Her parents so disapprove of her divorce that she must raise her girls with no family support. She weighs all her decisions and choices on an internal voice that belongs to her hypercritical mother. In a fit of rage, Grace strikes out.
Leah must begin life again in a homeless shelter with her two children. The simplest pleasures are luxuries, and she is overwhelmed with fear. She dreams to give her children a sandbox, but under pressure she loses control and wonders if she can ever forgive herself.

These women and their anger appear in front of Dr. Olivia Bayer, whose unconventional treatment comes under question:

Getting there is not going to be a walk in the park. This is the moment when Olivia absolutely has to stop doubting herself. Even as she wants to take Leah home and feed her warm soup, make Jane walk out the door barefoot, tell Grace, who should know better, to dig deep, and remind Kit that the journey is often much more important than the destination, she must let them all figure it out by themselves.

Instead of traditional anger-management meetings, these women are given assignments that defy all reason. As a result, they all face the ultimate choice: should they change and move forward or remain in the past?

I fell in love with the author's intricately layered characters and storytelling. Her ability to capture problems so prevalent in women's lives today is uncanny. This book is so much more than just another story about women's issues. The readers will go on a journey and discover a lot about themselves in the process. Miracles still manifest in the most outstanding ways.

The Best Food Writing of 2011

2012-02-13T09:00:00.000-05:00

Nonfiction

Food, Glorious Food

BEST FOOD WRITING 2011
Edited by Holly Hughes
299 pp. LifeLong Books

Reviewed by Kate Reynolds

Nothing has exploded more forcibly on the public conscience than the more-or-less recent fascination with gastronomy (defined as “the art or science of good eating”). We have TV channels devoted to the fine details of food preparation and appreciation and even several popular series where the object is to choose chefs to create more TV food shows. Foodie magazines line grocery shelves. About a zillion foodie blogs dissect restaurants and recipes and the creations of local chefs. Still, if you are like me and have an appetite for even more, there's good news. Holly Hughes' Best Food Writing of 2011 is as tasty as a platter of holiday appetizers. Forty-five writers, restaurant critics, and bloggers serve up thoughtful comments on every aspect of physical nourishment. In doing so, they nurture the foodie soul.

Food has always reflected values, and so a compendium of food writing in any given year provides cultural insight. In today's egalitarian world, you won't find many food writers rambling on about decadent meals in expensive restaurants. This year, Hughes' choices focus on locavore, small producers, and healthy fast foods. Not that there is no decadence here. The pendulum does swing, but a history of food writing is at its core a history of popular values, and the collection in this book proves the point.

I was particularly surprised with the selection of offerings from bloggers. Take heart, bloggers! If you know your way around the kitchen or have an especially keen knowledge of local restaurants, you will be noticed.

A sampling of this year's favorite stories:

In Floyd Skloot's piece, "The Famous Recipe," the author researches a recipe, “veal Italienne Sklootini,” said to be created and prepared by his long-deceased mother. Problem is . . . she didn't cook. Ever. Yet there was the famous recipe included in an old cookbook called the East End Temple Young Married Set. How did it get there? This one's a hoot.

"Everything Comes From the Sea" by Colman Andrews. The book opens with this fine story and made me want to hop a plane to Venice for a platter of boiled shrimp, dressed with olive oil and parsley, served with baby artichokes.

"The Case for Handwriting," by Deborah Madison. The author reminds us that handwritten recipes and notes help recall earlier times, as well as the person who wrote them. Sure, Epicurious is faster, but . . . don't you miss the personalization of beloved recipes? I had forgotten how much I cherish my grandmother's handwritten cherry pie recipe, the one where she called for a ten-cent package of cream cheese.

"I Believe I can Fry," by Katy Vine. Possibly my favorite in a buffet of choices. Abel Gonzales, described as the high priest of frying at the State Fair of Texas, has created such bizarre sensations as deep-fried beer, a fried PB & J sammy, deep-fried Coke, fried fruit, as well as his signature dish, fried butter. Fried butter, you ask? Yep. That made Letterman's Top Ten list. Oh, Gonzales has suffered his failures, too. Fried lettuce was a bust. Fried fruit cocktails turned to mush. It's what happens in any extreme sport. Sometimes you crash and burn. And sometimes you become the guru of fried foods.

A few other subjects explored in the collection: The true definition of soul food; on becoming an intuitive cook; thoughts on the science of cooking; enjoying a truly ripe melon; and another personal favorite, how The Fry Girl ate dangerously for an entire year―and lived to tell.

Good food writing has always been something of a mystery to me. Without the luxury of viewing the dishes or smelling aromas from the stove or tasting the end results, a reader is at a severe disadvantage. In fact, I wonder that anyone would want to read about cooking, when food needs all five senses to appreciate it fully. And this speaks to the skill of these writers in exciting the taste buds―and the imagination.

The Best Food Writing of 2011 is a fine read.

This Is a Call

2012-02-09T09:00:00.000-05:00

Non-Fiction

Rock's best-kept secret

THIS IS A CALL:
The Life and Times of Dave Grohl
416 pp. Da Capo
By Paul Brannigan

Reviewed by Doris E. Pavlichek

“When Nirvana ended, I wasn't finished. I'm still not f***ing finished.” -Dave Grohl

Dave Grohl's music has been a fixture in my personal collection since the days when the rockers among us were buying every new cassette tape coming out of Seattle's grunge scene. You may be forgiven, though, for not knowing his name out of context. Like most drummers, Grohl was able to hide in plain sight during his time with Nirvana, one of the most successful rock bands in American history. Though his face was on MTV, in magazines, and on t-shirts, Grohl was rarely recognized on the street. All eyes were on Kurt Cobain, the charismatic lead singer of the band. After Cobain committed suicide in 1994, Grohl decided that, rather than fading quietly away, he would continue to do what he loved - play music. In five days, he alone recorded what came to be the first Foo Fighters album. When the record took off, he formed a supporting band and went on tour. Since then, he has also contributed to many other bands, such as Queens of the Stone Age and Them Crooked Vultures.

Throughout his prolific career, he has often been referred to as “The Nicest Man in Rock.” Yet Grohl seems to be rock's best-kept secret, too. Paul Brannigan (former editor of Kerrang! magazine, a journal for the punk music scene) has had unprecedented access to Grohl throughout a good deal of his career. The two have known each other since 1997 and Grohl describes them as “friends.” He added, though, “it would take a long time for you to really get to know me.” Optimistically, Brannigan still undertook the task of writing Grohl's biography, This is a Call: The Life and Times of Dave Grohl.

I hesitate to be too hard on this book, because in the end I really liked it. However, it is more a compendium of punk rock history than it is a biography of Grohl. Dense with facts that may bore the casual reader, the first third contains information about Grohl's formative years and influences that may be easy to miss. If you are looking for a serious peek into Grohl's life, you will be disappointed. The book does not do that. Grohl's family life is only mentioned as a smattering of facts here and there. Barely a page is devoted to his first marriage; you can find out more facts about his personal relationships on Wikipedia than you can in Brannigan's book. Questioned about his relationship with Louise Post (of Veruca Salt), Grohl stopped, saying that was “a big no-no.” Yet Post has been more vocal.

Given that Grohl's relationships are off limits to a large extent in the book, it seems odd that so much detail would be given to Kurt Cobain's relationship with Courtney Love. It is no secret that the surviving members of Nirvana have been in and out of court, fighting Love for rights to control the music they created. Perhaps that is why not only do we find out the details of heroin purchases and overdoses; we also find out the exact date on which Kurt and Courtney had sex for the first time. This seemed gratuitous, but perhaps Brannigan was reaching for something to make the book a little sexier. It just seemed a cheap shot against two people whose lives were not part of the core mission of the book.

The book is not the type of sensationalist hype like Stephen Davis' Hammer of the Gods (about the band Led Zeppelin) nor the insider look at the people behind the music, like Hopkins & Sugerman's No One Here Gets Out Alive (about Jim Morrison and The Doors). That is, it will not go down in the annals of music biographies as one of the most readable or entertaining.

It is clear that Grohl managed his image through the interviewer, which may be key to his success. But as vocal in the book as he has been in public about his feelings on drug use and what it has done to the people in his life, like Cobain, Grohl may be a man in a glass house. Brannigan recounts an incident in which the two had “many beers,” followed by a couple of trays of Jagermeister (a licorice-flavored liqueur). Another anecdote in the book puts Grohl with his young family just off stage before a concert. He has had four beers and is ready to rock. We expect this kind of behavior from rock stars, though, don't we? Yet it seems a tad hypocritical to rant against “drug use,” when alcohol is just another drug.

Despite its failings, this book does provide a fascinating look at the fertile breeding ground that gave birth to such amazing bands as Nirvana and Foo Fighters. It especially examines the Washington, D.C., haunts, magazines, and alleyways that gave way to one of rock's most amazing drummers and songwriters. It also examines the strange phenomenon of the Seattle music scene, with its inspired music coming out of “strange” and “fifties-style” homes and people.

Brannigan catalogues many of Grohl's heartbreaks and successes in the industry. Before reading this book, I never knew just how many side projects Grohl had been involved in. He may be the nicest man in rock, but he is also one of the hardest working. Given that, if he wants his privacy and wants to keep some things close to the chest, I can understand it. Just be fair about it all around. No one in the music industry is squeaky clean. Not even Dave Grohl.

White Truffles in Winter

2012-02-06T09:00:00.000-05:00

Fiction

Precision of a gourmet chef

WHITE TRUFFLES IN WINTER
By N.M. Kelby
334 pp. W.W. Norton

Reviewed by Karyn Hall

Images of food symbolizing relationships is not a new idea. Writers often compare the messiness or spiciness of certain dishes, the stale and the fresh, the familiar and the exotic, and the ecstasy of taste to a variety of interpersonal and romantic experiences. But for Auguste Escoffier (1846-1935), considered one of the finest French chefs of the 20th century, food goes beyond the simile to create a range of emotions--passion, grief, anger, comfort, and hurt--in a way that those emotions are understood beyond the capacity of words to describe them. Escoffier, as imagined by author N.M. Kelby in her book White Truffles in Winter, believes dishes can capture personalities and experiences:

Madame Escoffier found herself dreaming of the first days of their marriage.

“Close your eyes,” he had said to her. “Food demands complete submission.”

And then he placed a perfect scallop in her mouth. “Do you taste the sea?”

Delphine did. Not just the salt of the sea but the very air of the moment that the shell was pulled form the sand. “A storm, perhaps. There is a dark edge to the sweetness of the meat. What do you taste?”

Escoffier's relationships are defined by food as seen in this interchange with his wife:

“Bread is propelled by yeast. And too much is as bad as too little.”

“Much like love.”

He stood and spoke quietly, “Much like love. Bread is a simple yet complicated thing. Yeast, flour and water--very common and yet together magic happens.”

“Given the proper environment.”

He moved slightly closer. “Heat and patience. It cannot be hurried; it must be earned. Perfect bread is a restrained and calculated seduction.”

Kelby describes the settings and the dishes Escoffier created at the Savoy and the Ritz, among other venues, with the precision of a gourmet chef. She also gives the reader a skillful and intriguing characterization of Escoffier as a man so obsessed with his profession that nothing comes before it. He lives in submission to food. On a cruise, the Kaiser says to him, “I only needed to taste the lamb you made that evening, which I sometimes still dream of, to know that you do not care for country or women, or God. For some that would make you a heathen. For me, that makes you the perfect man. You are untainted by affection or loyalty or love. I admire that. That sort of distance from the heart allows for greatness."

Kelby blends this famous chef's dedication to haute cuisine with his love of two women, poet Delphine Daffis and the actress Sarah Bernhardt, in an imaginative, absorbing narrative. The story is told as Escoffier, whose contributions to the culinary world include the à la carte menu, the fifth taste of deliciousness, and peach Melba (named after Austrian singer Nellie Melba) looks back on his life, writing his memoirs.

Delphine Daffis, Escoffier's wife who he won gambling, lives most of her married life with their children in Monte Carlo, where she retreats to avoid her husband's flagrant infatuation with Sarah Bernhardt. Delphine longs for Escoffier to return to her; he finally arrives in Monte Carlo to stay only when he is ready to retire, having lived almost thirty years separate from his wife. Even then Delphine is not free of Bernhart, as Sabine, their cook, looks remarkably like the actress.

Delphine is dying and her wish is that her husband create a dish for her as he did for Bernhardt, as well as many others. Delphine bribes Sabine to assist her in convincing Escoffier to grant her what she wants. The dish, Delphine believes, will assure she will be immortal and not forgotten. To grant Delphine's dream, Escoffier must struggle with the complexities of their relationship.

White Truffles in Winter is a book to be savored. I suggest you read it slowly, taking in its many layers to appreciate its complexity.

Inferno

2012-02-02T09:00:00.001-05:00

Nonfiction

In Harm's Way

INFERNO
The Epic Life and Death Struggle of the USS Franklin in World War II
By Joseph A. Springer
352 pp. Zenith Press

Reviewed by Gary Presley

Those of us who watched the news two months ago surrounding the seventieth commemoration of the Imperial Japanese Navy on ships of the US Seventh Fleet anchored at Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941 were forced to face the melancholy truth that the Greatest Generation is, in the words of MacArthur, "fading away."

That makes all the more precious this history of the USS Franklin and its battle for survival after it was struck by a Japanese dive bomber in the last months of the war. This is especially so since it is an oral history, a Terkel-like retelling of the epic fight to keep the great ship afloat rendered in the words of the heroic crew.

The Franklin was an Essex-class aircraft carrier, the most dominant ship of the war. The Imperial Navy may have seriously wounded the US Navy battleship fleet in the Pearl Harbor attack, but the great sea battles in the Pacific, the sea battles that sent a good portion of the Japanese fleet to the ocean floor, were ruled by aircraft carriers.

"Big Ben" should have sunk. That's the fundamental fact. It was only the courage of the crew, and their skill, that kept her afloat and brought her home.

Springer does a superb job in telling the story. Organized in ten chapters, with epilogue, appendices, bibliography, glossary, and index, Inferno's most appealing feature to history buff will be the you are there quality generated by the author's interviews with crew members.

The words of a crewman on a ship coming to the aid of the Franklin:

I saw men totally enveloped in fire jumping off ... As we passed the survivors, the guys on the Santa Fe were throwing overboard mattresses and anything else that floated, doing anything to help the guys in the water.

From one of the engine crew:

... if the ship took another hit, and if we were still down there, it would roll over, and there would be no way for us to get out. But we continued on down, anyway, shoving floating bodies out of the way.

Two men received the Congressional Medal of Honor "For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity ... above and beyond the call of duty." Donald A. Gary had been an enlisted man for most of his Navy career but had been promoted to the officer ranks and assigned as an engineering officer aboard the Franklin. He led hundreds of men to safety from below decks, areas filled with smoke and flame, then led fire-fighting parties, and finally returned below decks leading a party to re-start one of the engine room boilers.

Also receiving the Medal of Honor was Joseph Timothy O'Callahan, a Jesuit priest serving as a Naval Chaplain aboard the aircraft carrier, who "organized and led firefighting crews into the blazing inferno on the flight deck; he directed the jettisoning of live ammunition and the flooding of the magazine; he manned a hose to cool hot, armed bombs rolling dangerously on the listing deck, continuing his efforts, despite searing, suffocating smoke which forced men to fall back gasping and imperiled others who replaced them."

No one who reads Inferno will believe that those two men were the only heroes aboard the Franklin that day. Springer has done a great service to World War II history in his retelling of the Franklin. It will be a fine addition to any library.

Narrows Gate

2012-01-30T09:00:00.000-05:00

Fiction

In the shadow of the city

NARROWS GATE
By Jim Fusilli
574 pp. AmazonEncore

Reviewed by Eric Petersen

In the shadow of New York City is Narrows Gate, a small, gritty, mostly Italian-American waterfront community in New Jersey. Set in the years before, during, and after World War 2, this dazzling new novel by Jim Fusilli treads on familiar ground in its tale of the rise and fall of an organized crime family, but does so on an epic scope, filled with unforgettable characters and a nearly operatic narrative.

Narrows Gate opens in 1928 with a prologue showing how current mafia boss Don Carlo Farcolini ascended to power - through the brutal assassination of his former boss, Don “Gus The Boss” Uccello.

Then in the 1930s, eight-year-old Sal Benno comes perilously close to killing a man - Maguire, the crooked Irish cop who's been forcing his Uncle Vito, a grocer, to pay protection money. The dirty cop also shakes down other Italian storekeepers. He gets his comeuppance when two wise guys hang him in full public view.

Benno's best friend is Leo Bell, a boy his age. They consider themselves brothers. Nothing can come between them, not even when Leo reveals his shocking secret: his real name isn't Leonardo Campanello, as he had previously claimed - it's Jozef Hirlitz.

Leo and his family are Polish Jews pretending to be Italian to shield themselves from anti-Semitic persecution. Sal Benno has nothing against Jews because no Jew he'd ever known showed prejudice against him for being Italian. His tolerance is rewarded when he contracts a nearly lethal eye infection and a Jewish doctor saves his life after racist white doctors refuse to treat him.

William “Bebe” Rosiglino is a hapless, petulant mama's boy who can't keep a job. He has only one real talent - he can sing. So, taking the stage name Bill Marsala, he determines to make something of himself - namely, a superstar crooner.

When Bebe's singing career flounders instead of taking off, he agrees to his mother's Machiavellian plan to use their mob connections to make him a star. Soon, Bill Marsala is headlining at mafia-owned nightclubs and making records. He even marries Rosa Mistretta, the lovely, sweet-natured niece of mobster Domenico “Mimmo” Mistretta. Life is good. For now.

Meanwhile, as Sal Benno and Leo Bell come of age, the Pearl Harbor attack brings the United States into World War 2. Don Carlo, who has been languishing in a federal prison, is suddenly sprung and deported to Sicily. Under the orders of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, the American mafia will be allowed to operate with impunity in exchange for securing their Sicilian allies' help in conducting anti-Mussolini efforts in Italy.

Leo Bell volunteers for military service and serves in the intelligence division, working as a researcher. He becomes an agent for the OSS forcing him to play a dangerous game after the war ends.

Sal Benno does his part for the war effort (having lost an eye, he's 4F) while working at his aunt's Italian deli. Like most Italians in Narrows Gate, he knows the wise guys and respects them but has no interest in becoming one of them. Unfortunately, the wise guys like the kid who delivers all that delicious Italian food, so Sal is roped into becoming their errand boy.

As for Bill “Bebe” Marsala, he's a superstar, and yet, at nearly thirty years old, he's still just a punk kid. He breaks one of the mafia's most important unwritten rules - you don't disgrace your family. A married man can have broads on the side, but he must never, ever flaunt his affairs. Reckless and arrogant, Bebe, a compulsive philanderer, allows himself to be seen in public with some of his many mistresses, including glamorous actress Eleanor Ree. The ensuing scandal costs him his marriage and costs his wise guy sponsors a lot of money.

After the war ends, with the FBI still refusing to combat organized crime, Congress orders the OSS to take over and take down elected officials who are on the mafia's payroll. Leo Bell is ordered to infiltrate the Farcolini crime family. Sal Benno graduates from mafia errand boy and is ordered to babysit Bill Marsala until Don Carlo decides what to do with him.

As the novel builds to an exciting climax, the often high price of ambition becomes the moral of the story. Bill Marsala must face the consequences of offending his mafia patrons. As the government tightens the pressure on the Farcolini crime family, two of the organization's most trusted lieutenants must deal with the consequences of their decision to carry out a hit despite Don Carlo's explicit orders not to. And, Leo Bell must decide what's more important: his career or his best friend's life.

With crackling prose more visual than a Scorsese screenplay, razor sharp-dialogue, and meticulous attention to period detail, author Jim Fusilli has crafted a masterful gangster epic that deserves a place alongside classics of the genre such as Mario Puzo's The Godfather and Nicholas Pileggi's Casino. Highly recommended!

In Your Eyes a Sandstorm

2012-01-26T09:00:00.000-05:00

Nonfiction

“We don't have any happiest days.”

IN YOUR EYES A SANDSTORM:
Ways of Being Palestinian
By Arthur Neslen
328 pp. University of California Press

Reviewed by Bob Sanchez

We already know the story of Palestine from the perspective of Israel: the land belongs to Israel because it is a gift from God. God and America are on their side, and their opponents are either terrorists or simply not worth worrying about. In a recent debate, presidential candidate Newt Gingrich even called Palestine an artificial construct--as if Israel, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq were not.

In Your Eyes a Sandstorm sets out to provide a different narrative. British journalist Arthur Neslen interviews approximately 50 Palestinians and Israeli Arabs from various walks of life--“an unrepresentative but enlightening sample of Palestinian society”--to learn what it is like to be Palestinian. Normally “authentic and representative Palestinian voices are muted,” he writes, and in this book seeks to provide compelling personal accounts to cast a new light on the subject. According to Wikipedia, he has written about the Middle East for major publications and was Al-Jazeera's only Jewish staff member.

Representative or not, the result of the interviews is a sometimes highly personal look at the lives of people not often heard, showing their faces as well as their hopes and fears and daily lives. Arab children live risky lives in the region. They no longer have traditional authority figures like parents and teachers, who can no longer protect them. Authority now comes from the physical might of Israel, which Palestinians see as “the enemy” and “inherently evil.” One interviewee even states, “I want to die, because so many other people have died. I don't have a future.”

The problem seems intractable: Two groups want the same area, with coexistence being out of the question. Each wants the other gone. Yet Neslen writes that it was not always thus. “When the balance of power was different in Palestine, Muslims and Jews lived as peaceful neighbors.” The truth of that statement may be for another reviewer to verify, but they at least didn't always engage in open warfare and apartheid.

Now, say many of the interviewees, Israel usurps whatever land it wants and either drives Arabs out or brutalizes them. As for Arab violence, one of them tells Neslen, “If somebody took your house, kicked you out, and you had no law to turn to, what would you do?” Neslen asks another about the happiest days in his life. “I'm a Palestinian, and we don't have any happiest days,” the man replies.

This book is not an anti-Israel polemic, but it clearly shows a human sympathy and respect for the Arabs who interact with Israel daily. In fact, Arabs make up 20 percent of the population of Israel and over half of that country's impoverished citizens. “Don't think that you belong” is the message the Arabs often receive.

On the other hand, Neslen's interviews don't portray Arabs in a totally positive light. The suicide bombers are certainly real. Palestinians are banned from 30 professions in Lebanon and are not allowed to own property there. And it's certainly safer to be straight. Hamas, the religious movement that has ruled Palestine since 2007, advocates killing gays as a matter of “honor.”

In Your Eyes a Sandstorm is a well written and thoughtful perspective that Americans need to see. It's not that the U.S. should change its unwavering support of Israel--the book argues nothing of the kind--but that there are both flawed and decent human beings on both sides.

These often heart-wrenching stories beg the question: Why can't there be room and peace for everyone?

For now, there is no answer.

Grant's Final Victory

2012-01-23T09:00:00.000-05:00

Nonfiction

A warrior's coda

GRANT'S FINAL VICTORY:
Ulysses S. Grant's Heroic Last Year
By Charles Bracelen Flood
288 pp. Da Capo Press

Reviewed by Diane Diekman

Grant's Final Victory is the story of the final year of General Grant's life. Following his Civil War victory and two terms as President of the United States, Grant and his wife, Julia, purchased a home near Central Park in New York City in 1881. Although Grant “had little understanding of money” (according to the author), he and his son Buck contributed funds to Ferdinand Ward and James Fish to establish the four-partner investment firm of Grant & Ward. With Grant's prestigious name and the Ward/Fish financial reputation, their firm attracted investors and began paying large dividends. The Grants enjoyed life as millionaires.

On Sunday, May 4, 1884, Ward explained to Grant that the New York City treasury had drawn an excessive amount of money from the Grant & Ward bank, which could not open the next day without an extra $150,000. Grant borrowed the money from his friend, William Vanderbilt, the richest man in the city. On Monday Ward told Buck he needed an additional $500,000. Buck, who had trusted his financial partners to handle the books, took the company's records to financier Jay Gould and asked for help. Gould told him the securities weren't worth the paper on which they were printed.

Grant & Ward collapsed when banks refused to honor its checks. The $150,000 had never been deposited, and its accounts were empty. Throughout the life of the firm, Ward and Fish had kept two sets of books. Flood says, “The set kept for the official record, the one showing Grant & Ward's capitalization at $16 million, was a financial fairy tale.” Ward and Fish were eventually arrested, convicted, and sent to prison.

Grant, at age 62, was penniless. He and Julia sold most of their possessions, accepted as loans the donations from friends, and moved to a house in the country. According to Flood, “The reality of the moment remained: Ulysses and Julia had to have more money, just to live simply, let alone pay off their debts. Neither of them had any idea of how he could make any money at all.”

Feeling humiliated and betrayed, Grant worried about bankruptcy and how his role in the firm's collapse would be portrayed. Although he had previously refused requests to write about his war experiences, he now agreed to do so. A four-article contract with Century Magazine evolved into a plan for a complete book. He wrote to his daughter:

The indications now are that the book will be in two volumes of about four hundred and fifty pages each. I give a condensed biography of my life up to the breaking out of the rebellion. If you ever take the time to read it you will find out what sort of a boy and man I was before you knew me. I do not know whether my book will be interesting to other people or not, but all the publishers want to get it, and I have larger offers than have ever been made for a book before.

Then he was diagnosed with terminal throat cancer. Constant pain in his throat had made him agree in October to seek treatment.

Physicians told Julia her husband had a “complaint with a cancerous tendency.” By November the cancer had spread too far for surgery to be effective. One physician said their unanimous decision not to operate “was manifested in sparing him unnecessary mutilation and allowing him to pass the remainder of his days in comparative comfort. Relatively, however, it meant suffering for him until the end.” The following months became a race to write his memoirs before death claimed him, so book royalties could provide Julia with an income.

His friend Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, came to visit in November. He and Grant were, “at this moment,” the author says, “the two most famous men in America.” Twain offered to publish Grant's memoirs and Grant objected, saying he didn't want his friend to lose money on a risky venture. Twain persisted and Grant signed a generous contract with Twain's publishing company. Twain didn't yet know about the cancer.

With several editorial assistants, including son Fred, Grant sometimes wrote and sometimes dictated in a whisper. When the page proofs of the first volume arrived, his assistants read them aloud for his corrections. He finished the second volume on July 20, 1885. Since the previous September, according to the author, “he had written an average of seven hundred and fifty words every painful day.” Grant died three days later.

His farewell note to Julia concluded with “the knowledge I have of your love and affections, and of the dutiful affections of all our children, I bid you a final farewell until we meet in another, and I trust better, world.” Julia lived for seventeen more years and became a wealthy woman. She received $600,000 in royalties from her husband's Personal Memoirs.

I highly recommend Grant's Final Victory. I found it educational, easy to read, and enjoyable. Flood does a masterful job of weaving in Grant's experiences throughout prior years. Well-versed in Civil War history, Flood previously wrote books on Grant, Lee, Sherman, and Lincoln. The scenes of Civil War generals from both sides getting together twenty years after the war bring them to life; they become more than names in a history book. Flood's authoritative references to events that happened during certain years helped me put the time periods in perspective.

Although Ulysses S. Grant was also President Grant, he is much better loved and remembered as General Grant.

The Power of Neurodiversity

2012-01-19T09:00:00.001-05:00

Nonfiction

Difference, not disorder

THE POWER OF NEURODIVERSITY
By Thomas Armstrong, Ph.D.
274 pp. Da Capo Press

Reviewed by Karyn Hall, Ph.D.

Neurodiversity refers to the idea that atypical neurological development should be accepted as any human difference and not as a disorder or a disability. The neurodiversity movement evolved in the late 1990s out of the autistic rights movement.

Dr. Armstrong's premise is that we live in a culture that makes differences into illnesses with great cost to all of us. One result is that individuals who could contribute to our society are not given the opportunity or the means to do so. Another consequence is that we miss the gifts of neurodiverse individuals, such as the ability of individuals with attention deficit disorder to multi-task and constantly shift perceptions.

Dr. Armstrong lists eight principles of neurodiversity and bases his book around these principles:

Principle 1: The human brain works more like an ecosystem than a machine. In fact, the brain can and does transform itself in response to change, including developing or strengthening neural pathways.
Principle 2: Human beings and human brains exist along continuums of competence. To look at one person as normal and another as not normal is arbitrary.
Principle 3: Human competence is defined by the values of the culture to which you belong.
Principle 4: Whether you are regarded as disabled or gifted depends largely on when and where you were born.
Principle 5: Success in life is based on adapting one's brain to the needs of the surrounding environment.
Principle 6: Success in life also depends on modifying your surrounding environment to fit the needs of your unique brain (niche construction).
Principle 7: Niche construction includes career and lifestyle choices, assistive technologies, human resources, and other life-enhancing strategies tailored to the specific needs of a neurodiverse individual.
Principle 8: Positive niche construction directly modifies the brain, which in turn enhances its ability to adapt to the environment.

Dr. Armstrong's basic principles are well developed and persuasive. His descriptions of these principles are the strongest part of his book.

Dr. Armstrong applies these eight principles to autism, attention deficit disorders, dyslexia, schizophrenia, mood disorders, and intellectual disabilities. He asserts that each of these disabilities has a neurological basis and that each also has adaptive qualities. He describes cultures in which these qualities are valued or accepted. Instead of viewing these diagnoses as disorders, he proposes that that we accept them as neurological differences--variances on a continuum of normal development.

Dr. Armstrong recognizes the aspects of each disorder that interfere with the individual's ability to live a full and productive life. He proposes that we consider the modifications, or niche constructions, that neurodiverse individuals need to be independent and successful.

Also, he discusses the occupations that might be best suited for the strengths of neurodiverse individuals.

Noting that brain development can be changed through experiences, he also emphasizes the importance of using the strengths of neurodiverse children to help build the necessary skills for them to better adapt to the culture in which they live. For example, the parents of a nonverbal autistic child who was focused on a blank television screen videotaped pictures of how to play soccer and how to get in bed at night. They played the video on the television with a voice-over and were successful in teaching their child new skills.

His arguments for changing our views of these disorders are strong and compelling, with the chapters concerning autism and dyslexia the most convincing. However, the chapters for mood disorders and schizophrenia are less persuasive.

Dr. Armstrong, an educational consultant by training, acknowledges his father's experience with debilitating depression as well as his own. His dedication to his subject is evident and the book is well written and thought provoking.

Iron Man

2012-01-16T09:00:00.000-05:00

Nonfiction

Kggg ... as you do

IRON MAN:
My Journey through Heaven and Hell with Black Sabbath
By Tony Iommi with T. J. Lammers
416 pp. Da Capo Press

Reviewed by Alan Goodman

Tony Iommi, one of the founders of Black Sabbath, has performed as lead guitarist of the heavy metal rock band since its inception in the late 1960s.

The world has seen many influential guitarists. If there is any field that boasts tens of hundreds of “influential” and/or “famous” musicians, guitarists would reign supreme. Iommi surely has been influential in advocating a heavy metal rock style that, in its essence, filled a need for provocative lyrics, ultra-loud amplification, and overly animated onstage gyrations. However, the claim made on the book jacket placing Iommi “among the most influential guitarists of all time” seems a stretch of hyperbole, considering the long and glorious list of six-stringed practitioners of the art.

Yet, one might expect a read equal in excitement to the heavy metal performance experience of Black Sabbath. Sadly, the book is a letdown. What one might anticipate reading about Iommi's life in terms of excitement is missing in action. This is unfortunate as the particulars of Iommi's life are eventful and unusual enough to make a potentially exciting read. Iommi's fans have every expectation of following his numerous adventures and misadventures glued to the page by revelations of life in the fast lane of rock superstardom. One yearns to share vicariously the successes, failures, misadventures, and peccadilloes of Iommi through the years of his ever-growing fame. Iommi certainly does his part in revealing an endless parade of moments that should keep one turning pages at a furious pace.

Unfortunately, the successive pages turned ever slower. Could the scribbling of your local CPA provide any less excitement than does the narrative of this book? The writing renders everything to gray dullness -- turning heavy metal into a Louis XIV court minuet with its ritualized series of nods and winks. This fault rests upon the shoulders of Lammers, who one assumes is the professional writer and would be the major influence in writing style. For it is the writing, not the life described, that provides us with a curiously uninteresting accounting of this life experience.

Heavy-metal fans might well plod through this autobiography (I would describe it as such since Iommi shares the writing credit) through an intense interest in one of their idols. But for those who might like good writing, as well as good experiences to report, some inordinate amount of disappointment should be anticipated.

Here is a food fight in Sydney, Australia:

We were eating this exquisite food using all this nice silverware and everything, and then somebody flicked a pea at somebody else... He then flicked one back. Then it was something else, a potato ... At the end it was just ridiculous. The dinner was flying everywhere. Everybody was ordering: 'Can I have another salad, please, with loads of oil and vinegar?' ... 'Kggg,' on somebody's head... Bill [the drummer], of course, him being the one who always gets it, was absolutely covered: cake, olive oil, sauce and chocolate all over his face and all down his clothes. He was an absolute mess. We all looked pretty bad. Ozzy had yellow trousers on, we got hold of them and, 'kggg,' ripped the legs all the way up the hip. The owner of the restaurant was absolutely in bits ... [after an offer of money] the owner was alright then, going: 'Ah, carry on, carry on! ... We then got the waiters involved even more: 'Go on, give me a big cream cake under the table!'

Iommi is big on sound effects in his speech. In his recall of conversation long after the fact, these effects ring hollow. It's as if he is remembering the way a conversation might reasonably have sounded, speaking for both parties, and jacking the recall with sound effects for a feel of authenticity. A favorite phrase, “As you do,” appears more often than I bothered to count and is apparently intended to substitute for recalling some activity Iommi either does not fully recall or does not care to describe in detail.

“I'd see Eddie [Van Halen] a lot. I always had a bit of coke and he'd come around to my room and we'd talk till the death. As you do ...” The dismissal of any further detail with this phrase for this reader becomes tiresome. Whenever things are about to become interesting, Iommi ends with, “As you do.”

There is no denying that Iommi has led an interesting and unusual life, one that can boast numerous successes. From a troubled childhood, through several debilitating injuries, he persevered until his talent won out. By the end of the book I had developed a liking and empathy for Iommi. I just wish that the recounting of his life experience had done him the justice of a more exciting and interesting retelling.

The book, I fear, reads as “quiet” as Iommi's music plays “loud” ... as you do.

The Space Shuttle

2012-01-09T09:00:00.000-05:00

Nonfiction

"To boldly go ..."

THE SPACE SHUTTLE
Celebrating Thirty Years of NASA's First Space Plane
By Piers Bozony
Zenith Press, 900 color photographs

Reviewed by Gary Presley

Man arrived on the moon courtesy of two capsule-shaped spacecraft. It was NASA's Space Shuttle and its wings that rekindled Buck Rogers images in the minds of space buffs and put the world at work in outer space 135 separate missions.

Piers Bizony and Zenith Press have produced an amply illustrated "coffee table book" that attempts to cover the complete history of mankind's first space plane. Chapters are "Stages," seven in total, with a foreword and a worthwhile appendix that includes complete mission summaries. Stage Seven, "Readying the Bird" will be particularly interesting to space buffs as it gets into the details of preparing the orbiter. Also covered is the U.S-Russia rapprochement that resulted in the shuttle being used to ferry personnel and supplies to the international space station.

Suffice it to say the images are spectacular. The author gives credit due to other nations and astronauts participating in the shuttle program, and he covers every mission from first to last. Additionally, he provides a brief recap of the two missions that destroyed the Columbia and the Challenger, killing all of each crew. There also interesting asides as exampled by the history behind the names of each of the shuttles. The Enterprise was a sub-orbital test vehicle, and the Endeavour, Atlantis, and Discovery are the surviving shuttles.

The system wasn't perfect, as evidenced by the fatalities, but considering alone the missions to deploy, repair, and refurbish the Hubble Space Telescope, mankind has profited magnificently during the thirty years of Space Shuttle service.

Bizony is the author of a biography of Yuri Gargarin and One Giant Leap, a history of the Apollo 11 mission to land on the moon, also published by Zenith Press.

Leonardo's Legacy

2012-01-05T09:00:00.000-05:00

Nonfiction

Restless genius
LEONARDO'S LEGACY:
How Da Vinci Reimagined the World
By Stefan Klein
Da Capo Press

Reviewed by Kathy Highcove

Da Vinci died in 1519, but his life's work - his legacy - has never ceased to intrigue and enlighten ensuing generations. His extensive journals reveal a restless genius who searched his entire life to accurately perceive and understand the world around him.

In Leonardo's Legacy, author Stefan Klein probes Da Vinci's writings to reveal how his observations, theories and prophecies were precursors of modern thought. As Sigmund Freud once remarked, Leonardo “was like a man who woke too early in the darkness, while all others were still asleep.”

DaVinci left a legacy of marvelous art, sculpture, engineering structures, inventions, and scientific insights. He scribbled notes and made drawings his entire adult life to record his observations and discoveries for posterity. Unfortunately, he often wrote in code to hide his research from spying eyes, so these cryptic journals are still being interpreted by scholars today. The parts of his journal that have been analyzed and translated are the basis of Leonardo's Legacy.

Chapter by chapter, author Klein demonstrates that Leonardo was an artist, engineer, sculptor, inventor, scientist, writer, and builder - a multi-faceted mind. He asks the reader: What do all these seemingly diverse qualities have in common? Basically, a good eye. Da Vinci wanted to see things as they really were, not as some zealot or local literati wanted things to be. And to this end he spent many hours just watching the flow of water, the play of sunlight and shadow, the passage of stars, the flight of a bird, the germination of seeds, or - as evidenced by the mysterious smile of the Mona Lisa - the intricacies of human facial expressions. Without a telescope or a microscope, he tried to truly observe and record minute detail and changes in nature around and above him.

Klein believes that Da Vinci's greatest strength was the ability to see how seemingly diverse forms of life are interconnected parts of a larger universal pattern: analogy to the extreme, one might say. This Renaissance man had insights that would not occur to others for hundreds of years. Klein writes:

The analogies he kept finding everywhere he looked not only helped him to explain the world, but also gave wing to his creative genius. His world was like a set of building blocks, which he used to make ever new combinations. He let his thoughts roam and alight on ideas. His manuscripts explained “… a way to stimulate and arouse the mind to various inventions” by staring at random patterns, such as those found on a discolored rock, and discovering new shapes. Leonardo used this method to home his creations.

Influential people of the past century such as Einstein, Ford, Edison. Gates, Curie, Jobs, and Salk were adept at researching and pursuing their own studies on their own terms. But in Leonardo's time, to profess an independent belief or hypothesis was often akin to heresy. Truth-seekers paid dearly when they were judged to be dangerous heretics by the Church.

Leonardo was not religious, even though he was often employed by the church clergy. His creed was his own creed. And his beliefs evolved over time, unlike the infallible truths of the Vatican that were usually realized and proclaimed after a spiritual influx of divine inspiration.

Klein shows how Leonardo constantly hired out to raise funds for his studies. Whenever money ran short he found a rich patron - never mind their morals, personal goals, or power games - and he worked on his employer's projects. To the end of his life, Leonardo skillfully found patrons and a way to continue his studies in whatever community he inhabited. (That ability to survive on his own terms was genius in itself.)

This book demonstrates, through journal entries and drawings, that Da Vinci recognized the relationship between different forms of creation. For example, he saw the relationship between the human body's muscular and skeletal system and the beams, struts and supports of architecture. His analogies reveal a fertile mind that was truly awake to the intricacies of life around him.

The last section of the Klein book is a helpful chronology with illustrations taken from Da Vinci's journal. A thick section of sources follows the chronology.

If Da Vinci were to be magically transported to modern times, he'd fit right in. His thirst for knowledge was insatiable. He drank in all he could learn … about everything and anything. I wonder what he'd have done with an iMac and an iPad and the Internet.

Leonardo's Legacy effectively demonstrates how much one mind can achieve when determined to explore, experiment and question the status quo. Leonardo Da Vinci let his imagination lead him on to countless discoveries, and ensuing generations will always be enriched by the products of his genius.

Queen Elizabeth in the Garden

2012-01-02T09:00:00.000-05:00

Nonfiction

Gilded herbs for a virgin queen

QUEEN ELIZABETH IN THE GARDEN:
A Story of Love, Rivalry, and Spectacular Gardens
By Trea Martyn
325 pp. Blue Bridge

Reviewed by Sue Ellis

Sixteenth-century England evidently had a more temperate climate than exists there today. Gardeners of the period grew citrus trees! It's one of many interesting tidbits I came across while reading Queen Elizabeth in the Garden: A Story of Love, Rivalry, and Spectacular Gardens.

The author, Trea Martyn, who has taught garden history at Birkbeck College, University of London, and landscape history at Central Saint Martin's School of Art in London, is right at home with this absorbing look at Queen Elizabeth I and the two powerful men who vied for her favor with elaborate gardens. It was well known that Elizabeth loved gardens, and not only for strolling. She studied and used herbs as medicine, and favored strongly scented flowers and herbs to offset offensive smells, presumably from a common aversion to bathing.

Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, a manly man and Elizabeth's closest confidant, maintained lavish gardens at Kenilworth Castle, in Warwickshire, and had matrimony in mind. Meanwhile, William Cecil, Baron Burghley, her chief political adviser, oversaw the landscape at Theobalds Palace in Hertfordshire. His efforts were aimed at preserving the status quo by preventing any such marriage.

Many will find the politics and romance of the time fascinating, but if political rivals, beheadings, and flirtatious virgin queens aren't your cup of arsenic-laced tea, you'll still find the book a lavishly satisfying lesson in gardening history.

I was amazed to read that the cherry season could be extended for the Queen by covering the trees with canvas once they were in full bloom. Harvest could be postponed for a month.

Lavish garden parties complete with fountains, fireworks (hair-raising events staged with cannons and gunfire, which shook the ground and sometimes led to accidental structure fires) and stage productions entertained the Queen and her court. William Shakespeare was a mere boy when the garden parties began. It is believed that he either attended some of the festivities or knew about them--fodder aplenty for the stories he was destined to write.

With today's renewed interest in organic gardening, there is much to glean from the descriptions of Elizabethan methods for enriching the soil, irrigation--even beekeeping, as mentioned in this excerpt, describing the practice of John Gerard, the leading expert on herbs and rare plants at the time. He is known for his famous Herbal, published in 1597:

From the beginning of the dog days (around 17 July) until 18 September, he kept a close watch on his bees, making sure that they were protected from hornets. Two or three days before the new moon, he cleansed the hives, filling up any chinks and clefts against butterflies. He cut out the old combs from the hives in October and, during the winter months, kept his bees alive with sticks of fennel or honey and pear-tree leaves or herbs like flowering savory or marjoram, and then sprinkled them with sweet, pleasant wine, setting the sticks in a cross from one side of the hive to the other.

Sadly, the Renaissance gardens described in the book have only survived as ruins. The favored art form of the period was engravings, simplified black and white depictions sprinkled throughout the text that pale beside the author's visual descriptions. Here the author describes preparations for a queenly visit:

Painters were applying a special gum to the rosemary covering the thirteenth-century keep on the south side of the garden. They laid gold leaf on the needle-like leaves--in a few hours, the heat of the sun would harden the gum and bind the gold to it, so that the rosemary would stay gilded in the event of further rain.

I can close my eyes and visualize the garden 'tents', huge structures decorated with tapestries, vined arbors and magic. In reading Queen Elizabeth in the Garden, I also came away with the sense of fun that permeated the royal goings-on. Queen Elizabeth I lived to nearly 70, and why not? She got to play outside as much as she liked, didn't have to take a bath unless she felt like it, and ate cherries out of season.

The Hypnotist

2011-12-29T09:00:00.000-05:00

Fiction

A dark, icy thriller

THE HYPNOTIST
By Lars Kepler
Translated from the Swedish by Ann Long
528 pp. Picador

Reviewed by Eric Petersen

Over the past few years, Swedish thrillers have become hugely popular in the United States. First, John Ajvide Lindqvist gave us the unforgettable vampire classic Let The Right One In, then Stieg Larsson came calling with his Millennium series. Now, another Swedish author debuts with a memorable thriller.

In The Hypnotist, Lars Kepler (the pseudonym for husband and wife writing team Alexander and Alexandra Ahndoril) delivers a gruesome and disturbing tale of psychological horror as dark and icy as winter in Stockholm.

The novel opens with a horrific crime - an entire family has been found murdered, literally slashed to pieces. Well, almost an entire family. The son, 15-year-old Josef Ek, miraculously survives. Rushed to the hospital in critical condition, he remains unconscious, covered with a hundred stab wounds.

At first, the police believe that the killings were an act of retribution against the father, Erland Ek, a compulsive gambler heavily indebted to loan sharks. Joona Linna, a brilliant and relentless homicide detective for Sweden's equivalent of the FBI, believes otherwise. When his hunch is proven correct - Erland Ek was murdered first, making it unlikely that gangsters were responsible - he takes over the case.

There is one more survivor of the Ek family massacre - the oldest daughter, Evelyn, whose whereabouts are currently unknown, as she didn't live with the family. Unfortunately, when her brother Josef regains consciousness, his psychological trauma plunges him into a catatonic state.

Fearing that the maniac who killed Evelyn's parents and little sister may be out looking for her, Detective Linna makes a fateful decision. He contacts Dr. Erik Maria Bark, a brilliant psychiatrist and master hypnotist, to help him unlock the secrets in Josef Ek's troubled mind.

Dr. Bark is troubled himself. He's addicted to sleeping pills and tranquilizers, his marriage is crumbling, and his relationship with his 14-year-old son Benjamin, who suffers from a rare and severe blood disorder, is strained at best. Ten years earlier, Bark vowed never to hypnotize anyone again, a vow he's always kept. Until now. He agrees to hypnotize Josef Ek to help the police save his sister's life.

The hypnosis session produces shocking results. Brought out of his catatonia, Josef is taken back via hypnotic regression to the scene of his family's murder. He sees himself butcher his parents and little sister. Furious, he vows revenge against Dr. Bark.

Josef's hypnosis session is inadmissible as evidence, so Joona Linna must rely on his skill as a detective to find Evelyn Ek and close the case. The girl is found safe, living quietly in a remote cottage. When the police tell her of her family's murder, she breaks down - then sinks her teeth into the throat of a policewoman who tries to console her.

Taken into custody, Evelyn tells Detective Linna a shocking story of domestic madness and depravity. After Josef was born, their mother suffered from postpartum psychosis and refused to believe that he was her child. She wanted nothing to do with Josef, so Evelyn was given the responsibility of raising him.

From a very young age, Josef showed signs of being an evil, violent psychopath and sexual deviant. Ever since he was eight years old, he'd forced Evelyn to satisfy his perverted desires, threatening to murder their baby sister if she refused - a crime she knew he was capable of committing. But if Josef did murder his little sister and parents, why stab himself a hundred times?

Before Detective Linna can answer these nagging questions, Josef Ek, despite his injuries, murders a nurse and escapes from the hospital. Not long afterward, someone breaks into Dr. Bark's home, drugs his wife, and abducts his son.

Now the detective and the psychiatrist are left with more questions than answers. Josef Ek had vowed revenge against Dr. Bark, but why would he drug Bark's wife and take his son? Wouldn't he have simply murdered them instead? To make matters worse, if Benjamin Bark doesn't receive his next coagulant injection within a few days, he could die of a hemorrhage at any moment.

Dr. Bark thinks back ten years earlier, when his groundbreaking research in group hypnotherapy for adult victims of childhood abuse came to a sudden, crashing end. His patients were traumatized by a false memory accidentally planted during hypnosis. One patient attempted suicide, and another, a seriously disturbed woman, vowed revenge.

Meanwhile, Bark's wife brings her father, a retired ex-cop, into the investigation of their son's abduction. Together, they uncover Benjamin's association with a gang of strange, moody kids obsessed with the fantasy card game Pokemon. Could they be responsible?

The story takes many twists and turns, holding the reader in the grip of suspense en route to a nail-biting climax that features a final, surprise twist.

Lars Kepler delivers a thrilling tale of psychological horror with this novel. The English translation by Ann Long is generally solid. Some may be put off by the present tense narration and the awkward switch from third to first person point of view that takes place some 300 pages into the novel, as Dr. Bark recalls his hypnotherapy experiment that went awry. The manuscript could definitely use more editing.

Still, I recommend The Hypnotist as a worthy entry in the new genre of Swedish thrillers. You won't be able to put it down. Sköl!

Aerosmith

2011-12-26T09:00:00.002-05:00

Nonfiction

Not just on American Idol

AEROSMITH
The Ultimate History of the Boston Bad Boys
by Richard Bienstock
224 pp. Voyageur Press

Reviewed by Gary Presley

Bienstock, and sixteen assorted contributors, provide a history of one of the hair bands that ruled between the Beatles and Stones and disco and grunge.

Brilliant photographs, a concise (and rated PG) overview of the sex-drugs-and-rock times of the band will please fans, and perhaps introduce the group to fans who know its lead singer--"all mouth, hair, and multi-colored scarves"--only from his stint on American Idol.

There are fifteen chapters following Tyler and band-mates from childhood through feuding-and-fighting fueled by money, drugs, and success to the present day.

Phil Sutcliffe offers "Advice to Young Bands" in an Afterword. There's a discography, acknowledgments, and a useful index. Contributors also get a biographical paragraph at the conclusion.

Another coffee-table book that will appeal to fans.

Our Daily Bread

2011-12-22T09:00:00.000-05:00

Fiction

Backwoods noir

OUR DAILY BREAD
By Lauren B. Davis
257 pp. Wordcraft of Oregon

Reviewed by Lynne M. Hinkey

In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy tells us that "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Lauren B. Davis's latest novel is a moving and disturbing look at the myriad ways unhappiness and dysfunction manifest themselves not only in families, but in individuals, communities, and, ultimately in beliefs.

Labeled as "backwoods noir," Our Daily Bread is a story of insiders and outsiders, us and them, and what divides those groups. It is set in a grim suburban town with clearly defined--at least in the townspeople's minds--boundaries between the God-fearing folk of Gideon and the heathens on the adjacent North Mountain. There is no gray for the good people of Gideon. The townspeople see the world in purely black-and-white, right-or-wrong terms. If you aren't with them, you're against them, and rather than lend a helping hand to their less fortunate neighbors, they crusade against them, furthering the divide with every word and deed.

But for the reader, everything comes in shades of gray. Even within the tightly knit Gideon community, where everyone knows everyone else and their business, the lines dividing 'us' and 'them' aren't subtle. Churchgoers, who have been attending The Church of Christ Returning since the town's founding, dictate who is brought into the fold or excluded. The church is "the center of Gideon, the heart of its beliefs and behaviors." Through a series of sermon excerpts from the past century starting some chapters, we see the indoctrination to a belief system of exclusiveness.

Members of other faiths would surely be locked out of heaven due to their lack of a true, intimate, personal relationship with Jesus--a Jesus who apparently had gone before them to build a house of very limited capacity, since there was so much talk of the chosen few ... A Jesus who, according to Reverend Hickland, manifested his love through the bestowing of material goods.

Those who don't fall into line are shunned. The one Gideonite who truly behaves in a Christian manner, quietly helping when she sees a need, is frowned upon for her otherness. For daring to have a quiet faith based on deeds, not regular church attendance and loud proclamations. Patty Evans will always be under suspicion for the sin of being from elsewhere, casting that alien-shadow onto her husband, Tom, and their children, pushing them over the line to 'otherness.' Her departure, abandoning her family, drives them further into their alienation and only the friendship of Dorothy, even when unwanted, keeps them tethered to the town and each other.

On North Mountain, the divides between good and bad, black and white are equally mired in shades of gray. Albert Erskine is trying to distinguish himself from the rest of the adult Erskines (not surprisingly, called "the Others" by the children) by physically, emotionally, and behaviorally separating himself from them and their activities. "Surrounded as he was by kin--practically drowning in them--there wasn't a single person Albert could call 'friend'." He won't get involved in the family's meth production and distribution, but "only" grows and sells marijuana. Unlike the other adults on the mountain, Albert doesn't molest the children--his young siblings and cousins (or both)--but neither does he protect them. His self-imposed isolation from them makes him suspect within the family.

When Albert befriends Bobby Evans, it's obvious that the pairing can come to no good ending. Bobby is young, vulnerable and naive, all traits that endear him to Albert, who sees himself as a savior, guide, and mentor to the troubled teen. As their friendship grows, Bobby becomes more and more dependent on Albert to alleviate the alienation he feels both from the town and within his family. In his desire to belong, to fit in somewhere, he pushes Albert to take him up the mountain. Bobby's sheltered life, that he thought was horrific, gives him no frame of reference from which to understand true horror. He gains that understanding in spades when Albert finally agrees and takes Bobby up North Mountain.

As despicable as the behavior of the townspeople may be--gossiping, isolating, and shunning anyone who is different--we still understand their position when the shades of gray push closer to black than white. As uncomfortable as we are with Mable McQuaid's self-righteous dismissal of others, we are loath to embrace, or even feel sorry for the abusive, inbred, incestuous, meth-dealing Erskines. Even Albert, who represents the best of what could be in them, is too repulsive to truly embrace. Still, as events spiral to a somewhat predictable climax, the reader keeps hoping that Albert's inevitable ending will change.

Given his history and the situation, there really is only one possible outcome for Albert. Whether that is a moment of redemption or surrender is hard to say.

Readers should be forewarned, this isn't a pleasant read. It's not a novel to help you escape reality, but one that throws you into the raw, dirty middle of it. Be prepared for disturbing images, some described, some, often to more shocking effect, only intimated. That the tale of the good people of Gideon and the nasty North Mountain Erskines was inspired by true events in Nova Scotia makes Our Daily Bread all the more gut-wrenchingly tragic and unsettling.

Afghanistan and Pakistan

2011-12-19T09:00:00.000-05:00

Nonfiction Thorny but worthwhile

AFGHANISTAN AND PAKISTAN:
Conflict, Extremism, and Resistance to Modernity By Riaz Mohammad Khan
Johns Hopkins University Press

Reviewed by Alan Goodman

Riaz Mohammad Khan served as Pakistan's Foreign Secretary from 2005 to 2008. In addition, he served as his country's ambassador to China from 2002 to 2005, the European Union and Belgium from 1995 to 1998, and to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan from 1992 to 1995. He is author of Untying the Afghan Knot: Negotiating Soviet Withdrawal and was the Woodrow Wilson Center's Pakistan Scholar in 2009.

In Afghanistan and Pakistan Khan writes eloquently and in detail about the intricacies of politics, tribalism, religious ideologies, lack of effective leadership, and the dearth of modern societal institutions within each of these neighboring countries, as well as the problems arising from their social and historical interconnectedness.

The first of three sections deals with the history of the countries, the disruptions caused by invasion, and the boiling pot of interests and concerns with the successive presence of the Soviet Union and the United States. The second section has a detailed account of Pakistan's political leadership, and the country's fears, viewpoint on religious factionalism, the Taliban, its fraught view of India, and the border issues with Afghanistan. And finally Mr. Khan offers “Perspectives and Opinions” for solutions to the seemingly intractable tangle of conflicting interests between the west and the duality that is Pakistan and Afghanistan.

It is in the Epilogue where we finally see the author's vision. This overview should have appeared closer to the beginning, as it defines his thread of thought:

The present study has attempted to focus on the evolution of popular thinking in Pakistani society, which for years has struggled with the questions of its identity, role, and destiny in an environment shaped by increasingly intense though amorphous religious influences, Islamization, jihadi policies, and weak institutions of governance. The combination of these factors has induced a resistance to modernization in education, outlook, and behavior, a modernization that is fundamental not just to development and progress but also to the survival of a large and complex society such as Pakistan.

The book is extremely well written, although I found it a challenge to one's powers of concentration. I managed to read no more than twenty pages per night. When every evening's television news is reduced to fifteen or thirty seconds of visual mayhem, and the expert “analysis” offered in published articles and columns offers one brush stroke to elucidate a vast canvas, misinformation and intellectual laziness inevitably result. So, this reading is a serious undertaking, requiring a determination to understand in its wholeness the problem that has consumed so much energy and sacrifice from the United States.

One of the more intriguing revelations of the book enlightens the reader for the kind of subtlety that can elude the nightly news. And that is how Khan and political thinkers in Pakistan. differentiate between “good” and “bad” Taliban. I have been persuaded in recent years to differentiate between “good” and “bad” cholesterol. But to think something so key to how Pakistan views this religious sect would escape attention implies that there are other subtleties that might all too often create avoidable political problems.

In the second section, Khan attempts to justify much of Pakistan's complaint against the United States, the Soviet Union, Afghanistan, and India in having to deal with so many disparate interests. But many of his solutions for peace in the area had complaint for Pakistan's and Afghanistan's intransigence in equal parts. Most of the solutions are foretold in the book's title -- the need for modernization, for forward-thinking technological inroads, for infrastructure, for education, all of which would serve to bring Pakistan and Afghanistan out of twelfth century fanaticism and into the enlightenment of a modern Islam.

This book presents more than a casual one-or two-evening read. It is difficult at times to follow with strange sounding personal names and a tongue-tying rainbow of alphabet-challenged surnames. But I can think of no better or more complete way to learn the issues from a Pakistani's point of view, and in the process learn more of the subtleties of the conflicts than can be had from the bits offered by the daily print or video news.

The read is a bit thorny, but well worth the effort, and for that reason I would recommend it as an enlightening journey through a darkened corner of our global involvements.

Steve Jobs

2011-12-12T14:32:00.000-05:00

BUY THIS BOOK

Nonfiction

“I wanted my kids to know me.”

STEVE JOBS
By Walter Isaacson
656 pp. Simon & Schuster

Reviewed by Bob Sanchez

Without question, Apple's Steve Jobs will go down in history as one who brought technology and the arts together. Knowing this about himself and aware that he had cancer, he approached biographer and former Time editor Walter Isaacson to write his biography. “I wanted my kids to know me,” he later said. Isaacson at first thought the suggestion premature, but he agreed after realizing that Jobs's time might be running out.

The result of dozens of interviews with Jobs and his family and associates, Steve Jobs is a revealing look at the subject's many strengths and failings. A major theme of the book is Jobs's compelling personality, strength of will, and binary view of the world. Everyone Jobs encountered was in his view either a hero or a “shithead.”

Everything he saw, every idea presented to him, was either amazing or it “sucked.” He had the biggest ideas for the direction of technology, yet controlled the smallest details. The inside of his products had to be just as beautiful as the outside, even though consumers were never allowed to open them.

Jobs's biological parents Abdulfattah Jandali and Joanne Schieble were unmarried, and they gave their son up for adoption. Isaacson recounts the pain Jobs felt at his rejection as well as the love and nurture he received from his adoptive parents, Clara and Paul Jobs. As he entered his teens, he proved to be demanding, willful, and bright. His father Paul, a mechanic, instilled in him a love of perfection, simplicity, and attention to detail. But the drugs, including LSD, were Steve's own idea. Realizing that their son was smarter and stronger-willed than they were, the parents indulged him as much as they could.

Steve Jobs chronicles a fascinating life and career through Isaacson's solid research and writing. The spark of Jobs's career came, of course, when he and Steve Wozniak began tinkering with an Altair computer and created the Apple I. From the beginning, the dichotomy was clear: “Woz,” the engineering genius, would have happily shared their invention with the world for free; Jobs, the visionary and businessman, insisted on selling their work. Wozniak went his own way after the massive success of the Apple II, but the two Steves remained friends.

Isaacson clearly admires Jobs for his accomplishments, but Steve Jobs is no hagiography. Jobs said he wanted to be at “the intersection of humanities and science... Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do... People don't know what they want until you show it to them.” To achieve this, he drove Apple employees hard. Many of them spoke of his “reality distortion field,” where he could convince engineers to achieve feats they thought were impossible. And yet Apple's products could be “sublime,” Isaacson writes. “Sometimes it's nice to be in the hands of a control freak.”

Yet he had what many would see as massive character flaws, and he conceded that he was widely and accurately considered to be an “asshole” - his own word. “He was not a model boss or human being,” Isaacson writes. “Driven by demons, he could drive those around him to fury and despair.” Some thought of Jobs's callousness as a “lack of emotional awareness,” but it was something else: “He could size people up, understand their inner thoughts, and know how to relate to them, cajole them, or hurt them at will.” Ironically, while Jobs was a control freak in almost every other aspect of his work and life, he never asked to read or approve what Isaacson was writing about him. He said he knew that parts of the book would make him look bad, and he simply accepted the fact.

The result, Isaacson writes in his introduction:

is a book about the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. ... This is also, I hope, a book about innovation.

One of Isaacson's insights is that Jobs was not a man of exceptional intelligence. “Instead, he was a genius. His imaginative leaps were instinctive, unexpected, and at times magical.”

Most of us would not have lasted an hour working for a man like Steve Jobs, whom Isaacson places in a pantheon with Edison and Ford as one of the greatest businessmen ever. Jobs tolerated only the very best--the “A” players--and sometimes not even them. His attitude seemed to be that if you couldn't meet Apple's standards, you could always apply for a job at Microsoft.

Steve Jobs is an engrossing and accessible biography of a man you don't have to like to appreciate. I read it on my iPad, one of Jobs's last great products. It felt fitting.

My Green Manifesto

2011-12-05T09:00:00.000-05:00

Nonfiction

"A small love affair with something in the world."

MY GREEN MANIFESTO:
Down the Charles River in Pursuit of a New Environmentalism
By David Gessner
224 pp. Milkweed Editions

Reviewed by Carter Jefferson

“Global warming! We're doomed!” So shout the Very Serious People who constantly write books and blogs trumpeting the horror of it all.

But David Gessner has a different view. They're right, he says, but why don't we have fun while we can?

In this subversive book, he and his old school buddy Dan Driscoll kayak and canoe the length of the Charles River, from it source in Hopkinton, 26 miles from Boston, to the heart of the city. They have fun watching birds like the ospreys, which fly high and dive hard for their prey, or the blue herons that so gracefully point their way. They also love just being out in the wild. Readers will enjoy the ride, but Gessner wants us to do more than that―he wants us to know that we're all animals, and nature is our home, even if we don't realize it.

Most of us do our jobs and keep busy constantly: we know we should drive less, eat less, stop our incessant demands for more of everything, but we wear blinkers and go right on. We're hypocrites. Gessner insists that we stop and look around. Nature is everywhere, in forests, in flowers, in the sky, on the ground. We must see it. And then we need to act:

Have a small love affair with something in the world.
Get in a fight.
Launch a larger project of self and world.

Gessner's prime example of a fighter is Dan Driscoll. This is, in fact, Driscoll's story. He works for the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation, and lives on the Charles River, which used to be one of the nation's filthiest waterways. The federal Clean Water Act passed in the 1970s made a huge difference, but that was only a start. One day back around 1999 Driscoll found his calling: he would do whatever it took to use the river to bring us all back to nature by constructing “bike paths”--he figured nobody would care about “nature trails”--that would let people walk the length of the river, and maybe beyond.

Most of his co-workers thought he was crazy.

At first, in those days, I just ran on raw enthusiasm. I didn't know you weren't supposed to try and do extraordinary things. I'm glad I was naive, or I wouldn't have started in the first place. I had no idea what kind of fight I was in for.

The state of Massachusetts actually owned miles of the banks of the river, but nobody cared, so those edges had been taken over by the abutters. Parking lots, lawns, factories, grocery stores--all sorts of places a long way from “wild”--covered the edges of the river. When Driscoll began his fight, at first the abutters fought back. For three years he knocked on doors, showed off his plan, and persuaded hundreds of people that they'd benefit, not lose, when they backed off to leave room for the paths. And Driscoll won. The paths now exist. There's a great deal more to do, of course, but any of us we can help at least a little.

Like the Charles, Gessner's Manifesto meanders, turns back on itself, veers off in one direction then in another. Gessner's voice is so informal it surely will shock the more pious environmentalists he scorns. Should anyone care to find a particular fact mentioned in the book, he's “screwed,” as Gessner would put it. There's no index, though few books have ever needed one more, but backnotes at least make it easy to find all his sources. Gessner has written several earlier works demanding that we all pay attention to our earthly home.

The Manifesto more than a good read--it's a primer for anybody, anywhere. All of us may be inspired to take his advice, to find something to love, get in a fight, and save an important part of the world―for a while. Global warming is already beginning, so we're sure to lose in the end. But think what we might accomplish before we meet the days of doom!

The Vegetarian Imperative

2011-11-28T09:00:00.000-05:00

Nonfiction

How about meatless Mondays?

THE VEGETARIAN IMPERATIVE
By Anand M. Saxena
Johns Hopkins University Press

Reviewed by Rita Richardson

If you've heard it once, you've heard it a hundred times. Eat more fruits and vegetables. After you read this book, you may never want to eat anything else.

The Vegetarian Imperative is not an invitation but an order. An order to curb our unending love of meat and dairy products, the production of which is slowly but surely draining and straining our natural resources to the breaking point.

If you already are a vegan, you'll find plenty of fodder to substantiate your beliefs. If you're a meat, cheese, or dairy lover, you may not like the results of the author's investigations. (He is a lifelong vegetarian himself.)

Saxena describes in detail how our insatiable desire for meat is destroying and decimating every known ecosystem by land and by sea.

In a factual, reportorial fashion--never evangelical or preachy--he presents graphs, tables, footnotes, and charts that show dramatically how we are killing the earth and ourselves with our meat and dairy-based menus.

Chronic diseases, starvation, exhausted resources--a recipe for disaster--are the results of our eating habits. Cattle use land and water and lots of it. Lagoons have become public health hazards. Fish swim in contaminated waters from manure land runoff, while fishing trawlers rake the ocean floor, upsetting the natural order of things.

It's enough to put one from eating anything.

You may by now be thinking this is another doomsday scenario but it's really a plea to wake up and pay attention to facts like these:

Emerging nations that once existed solely on a grain and plant-based diet are now devouring meat, adding to the problem.
Chicken has more cholesterol than beef or pork.
The daily intake of just 1 ounce of processed meat raises the chance of colorectal cancer by 50 percent.
Female vegetarians outnumber males 2 to 1.
The average American consumes 35 pounds of cheese and 22 gallons of milk per year.
“Farms” in Asia provide 80 percent of the shrimp we eat.

The author readily admits that vegetarianism has never really caught on in our country. Meat and cheese are more satisfying than a bowl of carrots. But he cautions that we need to start making better choices.

He presents three good arguments for a plant-based diet: personal health; saving the environment for future generations; and combating world hunger. It's hard to argue that these are not superlative reasons to confront reality.

Cut-up meat, all sanitized and wrapped in plastic on a tray, gives the shopper no hint of the inhumane conditions in CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation). Fish fillets gleaming on ice at the fishmonger don't tell the back story of cages, “farming,” feces, and hormone-infected waters.

This book is a cry for help.

We can't all plant victory gardens or recreate the pastoral idyll of a small family farm, but we can make ourselves aware of where our food really comes from. We can adopt a more plant-based diet; support local farm initiatives; and if not cut out meat completely, then cut down so that meat is a condiment and not the main course. (This is my take-away from the book and not the author's.)

Should you read this book? That depends on how much you want to know about the current state of food. Saxena sums it up well:

...the current situation and future trends indicate that increasing population, overconsumption, degradation of the environment and exhaustion of...resources may impose...serious restraints on absolute dietary freedom. We must drastically reduce our consumption of food of animal origin and eat more plant-based foods for our lifestyles to become sustainable.

He does an admirable job of backing up this thesis and has done a good job of convincing this reader to begin making better dietary choices.

For a start: Meatless Mondays anyone?

The Sword of Saint Michael

2011-11-21T09:00:00.000-05:00

Nonfiction

Pull up your tank behind me

THE SWORD OF SAINT MICHAEL:
The 82nd Airborne Division in World War II
By Guy LoFaro
746 pp. Da Capo Press

Reviewed by David Hoekenga, M.D.

The Sword of Saint Michael is not the story of the 82nd airborne division. At 358,000 words, it is the encyclopedia of this amazing division. It not only describes the division, but the regiment, company, platoon, and often individual as they fought in Sicily, Normandy, Nijmegen (Market-Garden), and the Battle of the Bulge. This book may contain more than you want to know about this military group, amazing though it is in every respect.

It all grew out of fifty men that “constituted the entire airborne contingent” of the U.S. Army in the summer of 1940. By August 1942, General Ridgway reviewed 14,000 airborne in addition to glider infantry regiments. By 1945, the Waco gliders (the fourth-most produced combat aircraft of the war) had been manufactured by firms as diverse as Heinz and Steinway.

The first U.S. airborne landing in Sicily was disorganized and scattered, but the troopers quickly coalesced like drops of mercury in a watch glass. General Gavin organized a mixed group of clerks, cooks, truck drivers, and soldiers from the 45th Infantry Division into a fighting force. He ordered a limited withdrawal as German tanks approached. Then LoFaro writes, “Yet it was not to be a wholesale withdrawal. Rather, Gavin arranged his troops in a new defensive line on the reverse slope of Biazzo Ridge. The advantage of defending from the reverse (or friendly) side of the ridge was that it shielded the troopers from German tank fire. The disadvantage was that it relegated them to a close-in fight once the enemy crested the ridge. Gavin felt that if his troopers engaged “the less heavily armored underbellies of the tanks when they first appeared at the top of the rise,” they might have a chance of knocking a few of them out, and if not, they were to remain in place anyway to kill or drive off the accompanying German infantry…We are staying on the goddamned ridge,” he shouted at one point, “no matter what happens!”

The 82nd Airborne Division took 181,000 enemy prisoners during the entire war, and received three Medals of Honor and 900 Silver Stars. The terrible price was the unit's 19,500 casualties.

What was the secret of the 82nd's success? They were well trained. The author states they showed “speed, aggressiveness, daring and imitative” wherever they were deployed. Only once in 422 days of combat did they retreat, and then only because they were repeatedly ordered to do so. However, perhaps the most important element of their success was two extraordinary generals--James Gavin and Matthew Ridgway who led from the front and although reckless somehow managed to avoid being shot. For example, on Christmas Day during the Battle of the Bulge, in two feet of snow, Gavin dropped into a foxhole to share fried chicken with several of his men.

The author uses official records, letters, journals and testimonies of the soldiers to weave a complex tale of every engagement large and small.

An incident during the Battle of the Bulge summarized for the author the attitude of the 82nd airborne, “It was 22 December 1944. The U.S. First Army was still in headlong retreat from the onrushing panzers that were seemingly everywhere. A column of American tanks came upon a lone bazooka gunner in a snow-covered bunker. The lead tank commander leaned down from his hatch to ask where the American lines were. The bazooka gunner, a private from the 325th Glider Infantry Regiment replied, “You've just arrived at the American front lines, pal. Now just pull your tank up behind me. I'm the 82nd Airborne Division, and this is as far as the bastards are going.”

The skirmishes and battles are clearly described and the anecdotes are fun to read and retell. The real question is do you want to spend 32 hours (the average person reads 200 words per minute) plowing through this tome?

The Tin Ticket

2011-11-15T09:00:00.000-05:00

Nonfiction

Down Under in the Female Factory

THE TIN TICKET:
The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women
By Deborah J. Swiss
362 pp. Berkley

Reviewed by Sue Ellis

For many of us, the history of the British Isles' deportation of convicts to Australia is rouged with romance and misconceptions. Everyone enjoys a story about an underdog, the person who overcomes low beginnings and flourishes in spite of challenges. I had the idea that the convicts were welcome in the land down under, and that their punishment was to fend for themselves in a strange land. I pictured them linking arms as they strode down a gangplank into a rough-and-tumble land of opportunity.

In The Tin Ticket, I learned that Australians of the time hardly welcomed the convict population, or 'stain' as it was known. Many lobbied long and hard for the practice to stop, although judging by its duration, from 1788 and 1868, they may as well have saved their collective breath. It was only after slave labor had served its purpose in helping the British gain a foothold in the new Australian colonies that the exodus was finally halted. And prisoners didn't walk down a gangplank into freedom, but into another miserable prison where they would be farmed out as laborers, or as in the case of the women, breeders.

The first thing to ground me into the reality of what really happened was the description of the destitute women and children who were deported for petty crimes such as stealing food or clothing. After perfunctory trials, they would up in London's Newgate Prison, waiting in dank, overcrowded cells for one of the twice-yearly voyages to Australia, where men outnumbered women nine to one. Those who survived London's prison, a notorious hellhole, were further challenged to survive the journey by sea, closely billeted as they were in the belly of a disease-ridden ship and living on stingy rations of weak broth and bread. Many convict women were impregnated by members of the ship's crew before they set foot in Tasmania.

Deborah J. Swiss, the author, did her homework. For six years she researched original nineteenth-century documents and diaries to recreate the lives of four women who not only survived the experience, but went on to become solid citizens:

Convict #253, Agnes McMillan, age twelve, and Convict #284 Janet Houston, age seventeen, arrested together for stealing clothing at a shop in Glasgow.

Convict #1231, Bridget Mulligan, age twenty-seven, for stealing a dress, a milk tin and a white petticoat in Dublin.

Convict #151, Ludlow Teddler, age forty-seven, a widowed mother of four, for stealing eleven spoons and a breadbasket from her employer in London.

They served their sentences at the Cascades Female Factory, a prison that was located in present day Tasmania--a place where nine-hundred infants and children perished. If a woman survived her stay at the prison and was eventually released, she had no place to turn unless she could attract a man or find work. Many lived in hovels alongside the road, or in public institutions for the destitute or the insane.

By the time Agnes and Janet were arrested, a voice of reason and compassion had intervened on the behalf of the forgotten population of women and children in prison. In 1813, Quaker reformer Elizabeth Gurney Fry, already renowned for her work with the homeless, was visited by American Quaker minister Stephen Grellet, who had just visited the women's ward at Newgate Prison. The conditions he found there had shocked him to the core.

What ensued was a tireless campaign by Elizabeth Fry to ease the misery of the imprisoned women and children in Britain. It was she who issued the identifying tin tickets the women wore around their necks when they boarded ship. They were also supplied with modest clothing and a sewing kit to keep their hands and minds busy on the voyage.

The Tin Ticket reads like a novel but is, in fact, an enlightening and fascinating history that honors the memory of the stalwart women who not only survived the British penal system, but went on flourish in spite of the ordeal. For the many who died, it's a eulogy that speaks to the needless suffering brought about by greed and inhumanity.

What Does It Mean To Be Safe?

2011-11-14T00:01:00.043-05:00

Click here to buy
(Don't forget to use the code BBTSAFE)

This week the IRB offers something different for all of you who are parents or grandparents of young children. The books are charmingly illustrated, brief, upbeat, and to the point. They are meant to spur discussions between youngsters and adults.

Children need easy guidelines to help them understand how to protect themselves and feel secure in their environments. Rana DiOrio's newest addition to her award-winning series explores physical, emotional, social, and cyber safety in unthreatening ways that spark meaningful conversation between adults and children about staying safe.

Little Pickle Press founder
Rana DiOrio

Series author Rana DiOrio is an investor, investment banker, lawyer, and the mother of three children. She is also the founder and CEO of Little Pickle Press which is dedicated to helping parents and educators cultivate conscious, responsible little people by stimulating explorations of the meaningful topics of their generation through a variety of media, technologies, and techniques. What Does It Mean To Be Safe? is the fourth in her What Does It Mean To Be… ? picture book series, and is written with 5-8 year-olds in mind. All books in the series are printed in an environmentally friendly manner using recycled paper, soy inks, and green packaging.

You can get free shipping and a SAFE poster made of TerraSkin, the tree-free paper, with your order. Just enter BBTSAFE at check-out.

You can also follow Little Pickle Press on their blog, on Facebook, and on Twitter.

Dead Letters

2011-11-07T09:00:00.001-05:00

Nonfiction

"What a long strange journey it's been ..."

DEAD LETTERS
The Very Best of Grateful Dead Fan Mail
By Paul Grushkin
Quayside Publishing/Voyageur Press, 496 color images

Reviewed by Gary Presley

Quayside Publishing once again expands its offering of large-format illustrated books--coffee table books--by reaching into the realm of rock-and-roll history.

In the United States rock-and-roll, at least as music played by and for an audience of white people, began to grow into the public consciousness with Buddy Holly, Bill Haley and the Comets, and Elvis Presley, at least until the British invasion by the Beatles, Rolling Stones, and others. Then came Vietnam, and nothing was ever the same again.

The Grateful Dead came together in that flower-power era, and in San Francisco, the heart of the counter-culture. The Grateful Dead became more than music; its name became shorthand for a worldview. Dead followers began to interact with the group in a way that reflected that alternative ethos, up to and including "Deadheads," camp followers who simply trekked to multiple Grateful Dead concerts over months or even years.

It's no surprise then that communications with the group's headquarters began to arrive in fancifully decorated envelopes. And so we have Dead Letters, nearly five hundred images, nearly all of them drawn by fans on envelopes containing ticket requests and sent to the band's headquarters.

Image from Dead Letters

There are fourteen chapters bracketed by a foreword and preface, and an epilogue and acknowledgments. Many of the chapters classify the drawings by theme:

Chapter 3: Song Interpretations: It Speaks of a Life That Passes Like Dew
Chapter 5: The Lightning Bolt: Arrows of Neon
Chapter 7: Dead Head Characters: Come and Join the Party Every Day.

Gruskin is a co-author of a Grateful Dead history published in 1983, and he has written other books about the place of art in rock-and-roll, including Art of Modern Rock: The Poster Explosion.

Deadheads will want this book. As the basketball legend Bill Walton says in his forward to the book, "Dead Letters is essentially a love story--letters and all."

The Rehab Myth

2011-10-31T09:00:00.000-04:00

Nonfiction
Theory, so far

THE REHAB MYTH:
New Medications that Can Conquer Alcoholism
By Bankole Johnson, MD
260 pp. Da Capo Press

Reviewed by David Hoekenga, MD

Alcoholism is a huge health problem in the US that affects one in three families, because seventeen million individuals abuse or are dependent on alcohol. According to the author:

It resembles asthma, diabetes, and high bloods pressure in that all three illnesses:
Show consistent pattern of symptom control and relapse.
Have strong genetic and behavioral components.
Can be reliably identified with diagnostic methods.
Can be managed effectively with changes in behavior and medication.

The major difference between alcoholism and the other health problems mentioned above is that, in our society, alcoholism is seen as a social problem rather than a health issue. Only thirteen percent of people with drinking problems receive any treatment!

Most addictionologists and health care professionals currently believe that Alcoholics Anonymous is the best treatment for alcoholism. However, Dr. Johnson states that while “AA reports its success rate is 95% it has proven to have a failure rate of 95%.” A five percent per year cure rate, he points out, matches the rate of spontaneous remission of alcoholism without any treatment found in a large number of studies.

The bulk of the book is devoted to a series of drugs that Dr. Johnson believes will work effectively to control alcoholism. Each is described in a chapter with a fictional case study.

First, he discusses naltrexone (Revia). It is supposed to block desire for alcohol. Taken as an injection for nine months, it worked miraculously in our fictional case. In the COMBINE trial naltrexone showed a modest improvement from 58 percent to 69 percent abstinence (not reported in the book). Furthermore, the combination of naltrexone and acamprosate (Campral), two of the agents Dr. Johnson touts, didn't increase abstinence in the COMBINE trial. Additionally, surprisingly, the combination of naltrexone and psychotherapy didn't improve results. The COMBINE study ending in 2006 is the largest study of interventions to encourage alcohol abstinence ever performed and enrolled over 1,300 patients.

The next case study involves an alcoholic, a sales “whiz kid” who benefited from topiramate (Topamax). The author feels it works well for clients who are still drinking. In one small study with 48 people in the placebo group, only 4 percent were sober. In the topiramate group half reported less craving for alcohol.

The third fictional case involves, “Abby Jensen…the kind of adult many of her sixth grade students say they want to grow up to be like.” She was placed on baclofen (Lioresal). In The End of My Addiction, Dr. O. Ameisen states that hundreds of patients have reported becoming “indifferent to alcohol” on this medicine.

The fourth drug Dr. Johnson talks about is acamprosate, which he feels works best with psychotherapy. However, the drug failed in the COMBINE trial, so I won't say anything more about it.

I was hoping for a practical book that I could use to replace the twelve steps in at least some cases. Instead, this is a theoretical book about neurotransmitters, alcoholism, and drugs that may help cure cravings in the future.

Unfortunately, it makes no suggestions as to what current alcoholics and their doctors should do. Dr. Johnson is absolutely silent about which of the four medicines--naltrexone, topiramate, baclofen, or acamprosate--is best. He does review the reasons for picking each agent at the end of his case studies in a chapter review. Sorting through the indications and cautions by flipping from chapter to chapter is tedious. When I tried to select a drug for one of my cases, after an hour of study I ended up confused.

Dr. Johnson concludes, “The revolution will burst forth from researchers (and) these new approaches should help ease the burden of ...alcohol-related problems each year...at a cost of $220 billion.”

Dreyfus

2011-10-24T09:00:00.000-04:00

BUY THIS BOOK

Nonfiction Le Dustup
DREYFUS:
Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century By Ruth Harris
539 pp. Henry Holt and Co.

Reviewed by David Hoekenga, M.D.

Alfred Dreyfus was a name from French history along with people like Colette, Diaghilev, de Lesseps, and Rimbaud that were familiar to me but their lives and accomplishments were lost in the fog. Ruth Harris in her book, Dreyfus, straightens all this out for one of these famous Frenchmen in her carefully written and exhaustive review of the affair.

Alfred Dreyfus was an artillery officer from Alsace-Lorraine and fiercely loyal to France. However, Alsatians were distrusted in the rest of France partly because they spoke French with a German accent. In September of 1894, a cleaning lady at the Germany Embassy in Paris stole a torn-up letter from the waste-paper bin of the military attaché. Harris writes, “The unsigned document was a memorandum, or bordereau, which contained military secrets of indifferent quality. Along with the other rubbish, the woman turned the fragments over to her employers at French military intelligence, who realized, when they pieced the bordereau back together, that it was proof of a spy in their midst.”

Harris writes, “In the middle of October a brilliant and ambitious young officer of Jewish origin, Dreyfus, was accused of being its author. He was court-martialed ten weeks later and found guilty by a unanimous verdict.” In January Dreyfus was publicly humiliated at a ceremony of 'degradation' staged at the École Militaire. “In front of a crowd screaming 'Death to Judas, death to the Jew', Dreyfus's epaulettes were torn from his shoulders, the red stripes on his trousers were ripped off, and his saber was broken in two,” reports.

The catastrophe was that Alfred Dreyfus, even after a superficial review of the evidence against him, was most certainly innocent. Despite this, the 'affair' went on for year and reverberations were still being felt as late as 1914 (when the First World War began). During the trial Dreyfus responded calmly to the witnesses, but his “monotonous voice irritated the court, as did his refusal to engage in theatrics.” His restrained style did not fit with the crowd's perception of how an innocent man should behave.

Anti-Semitism, always a strong undercurrent in French society, had enjoyed a strong resurgence in the 1880s. Books, pamphlets, and newspapers portrayed Jews as the killers of Christ, Jewish butchers as profiting from selling rotten meat to the French army, and Jews as using Christian babies' blood used to make matzo. Jews were also accused of being rapacious financiers and socialist revolutionaries, and of 'fixing' exam results.

During the trial, a secret note was shown to the prosecution, but not the defense. Two witnesses who knew that Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy was the real perpetrator never testified. The prosecution rigged the scanty evidence and spoke secretly and illegally to one of the judges. Dreyfus was unanimously found guilty and sent to Devil's Island, where his captors fed him rancid pork, shackled him at night, and hoped he would die.

Harris says, “Cracks gradually appeared in the wall of conspiracy against him.” Three years later in 1897, the vice-president of the Senate was told that the handwriting in the bordereau was identical to Esterhazy's, and he wrote an open letter to Le Temps. The senator was called a Prussian, a Jew, a bandit, and a pimp. He was so afraid for his life he wore chainmail under his clothing. The game was on. The army refused to admit any possible mistake, and conducted a sham trial to take the heat off, that, not surprisingly, found Esterhazy not guilty!

When Émile Zola entered the fray with an open letter entitled J'accuse all of France took sides, dividing the country into Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards. The affair overshadowed all national business for years. It was revealed that one of the key officers compiling evidence against Dreyfus had forged part of it. The officer committed suicide and the anti-crowd attempted a coup d'état. The country was tearing itself apart over this minor dustup.

In June of 1899 Dreyfus was brought back from Devil's Island for a second court martial, and “in a stunning verdict that outraged international opinion,” the author states, he was found guilty again.

Ruth Harris does a masterful job of telling this fantastic and twisted tale. If it were written as a work of fiction, no one would believe it. In many ways fin de siècle France was the most advanced and sophisticated place on earth, except for the Dreyfus affair.

Daughters of the River Houng

2011-10-17T09:00:00.000-04:00

Fiction Returning to her roots

DAUGHTERS OF THE RIVER HUONG:
Stories of a Vietnamese Concubine and Her Descendants
By Uyen Nicole Duong
269 pp. Amazon Encore

Reviewed by Kathy Highcove

This book begins-and ends-in 1994 with the story of Simone Mi Uyen Sanders, a Vietnamese-American naturalized citizen. America has been good to Simone. She's a wealthy lawyer with a prestigious firm and resides in a big New Jersey house with her American husband and her immigrant mother. But something vital is missing from her life. Suddenly she must return to her roots and search for the missing piece. She tries to explain her malaise to her puzzled husband:

I bear in me the collective subconscious of an extinct culture, with all its tragedy, which could trace back thousands of years, and that's why I am never truly happy, although I have all the reasons in the world to be happy...

Simone is one of the Vietnamese who took the last flight from Saigon on a chaotic April afternoon in 1975. Young Simone, certain she'll reap North Vietnamese retribution because of her family's royal ancestry, efficiently seduces Christopher, an American news correspondent, in his office. And voilà! Simone evacuates with other Vietnamese dependents on a US military helicopter. Once safe in America, she dutifully marries Christopher and begins her life in exile.

Survival in exile is a family tradition. Simone's matriarchal ancestors-great-grandmother, grandmother, great aunt and mother-also used their beauty and street smarts to survive in times of political turmoil. And each of these women suffered in exile when separated from their Champa homeland. This novel effectively relates a four-part familial history.

The author, Uyen Nicole Duong, deftly moves her story from a 1994 New Jersey suburb back in time to an 1885 Vietnamese river community (the extinct Champa Kingdom). Several chapters focus on Simone's ancestor: an orphan paddle girl named Huyen Phi. Her water taxi roams the Perfume River of Hue, transporting her paying passengers. Huyen is a darkly beautiful Cham woman, who thrives like a tropical bloom in her rain forest environment. She sings the songs and stories of her people as she paddles along and becomes a favorite oarswoman with locals and regular travelers.

One day, a handsome young traveler, the disguised Thuah Thanh, King of Annam, takes a seat in her canoe. He is immediately intrigued by the beautiful paddle girl, who is not that impressed with him. She thinks he's inventing stories about his royal status, and he's probably just another male flirt. Thanh's not used to a young woman's indifference; so predictably, he becomes fixated on Huyen and decides to add her to his harem. Not long after his second visit, royal musicians and house guards take up positions along the river-all the way to the palace. The surprised Huyen Phi soon finds herself the newest concubine of King Thanh.

For a while Huyen appears to be the King's favorite concubine. Inevitably, the young king finds new interests and new women. But he simultaneously tries to preserve his kingdom while he begrudgingly accommodates aggressive French colonists. Soon Thanh no longer makes nightly visits to Huyen's apartments. The once free and extroverted woman of the river sits by herself, night after night, with only her servants and old eunuch for company.

Eventually, Huyen conceives twins. The court soothsayers predict sons. Unfortunately, she delivers not the expected heirs, but twin girls! A double blow to King Thanh. While Huyen is caught up with caring for her babies, her mate truly becomes a virtual prisoner of the French invaders. He can't find a way to satisfy the bullying demands of the French colonial minister, Résident Supérieur, Syvain Foucalt.

The King, depressed and defeated, returns to Huyen Phi's apartment for one last conjugal visit with his favorite concubine before his own exile. In that visit, Huyen conceives a son, who will be known as Prince Forest.

After the King's banishment, Foucalt comes uninvited to the harem and the apartment of the renowned Huyen Chi - the Mystique Concubine. However, Huyen is not accommodating like the rest of the court and harem populace. She stubbornly resists Foucault's efforts to photograph her for Paris newspapers. Huyen will not be a trophy for the Frenchman. An angry Foucalt “frees” the concubines and children of the king. For most of the wives, their new freedom is cruel punishment. They have few resources. But Huyen Phi, the former paddle girl, finds that the cage door is finally open. She sees an opportunity to be independent and live close to the Perfume River once more.

The Mystique Concubine moves her few servants and her twin daughters, Cinnamon and Ginseng, to live in a village with a prosperous silk worm industry. Huyen takes to her new life and builds up a home silk business that supports her household. There, in her village home, she gives birth to Prince Forest.

Huyen's daughters, when grown, choose very different courses in life. One daughter, Cinnamon, stays in the silk worm village and manages the family's estate. The other daughter, rebellious Ginseng, joins the Vietnamese Revolutionary forces. Her form of exile begins in prison. Cruel imprisonment takes away both her beauty and her sanity. Ginseng's a heroine to the people, but mental illness cuts connections to her home and family.

Cinnamon's daughter Dew, the third generation, tries to fashion a comfortable life as wife to a professor nicknamed Hope. She gives birth to three children: Simone, Mimi and Pierre. Dew loves her lush gardens, the village, her home and tries to stay in her natural element, just as the paddle girl tried to stay with her river. But like her grandmother, Dew is forced to leave. Her husband, hopeful of a better job in the South, moves his family into a small dark house in Saigon. The granddaughter of a royal princess has only a tiny garden and a meager lifestyle in her southern exile.

The story of Simone, daughter of Dew, resumes in the last chapters of this book. She is attracted to a young Frenchman, André Foucalt, the descendant of Sylvain Foucalt. This section of the book is also his story. André has been told of the Mystique Concubine and the King's court by his grandfather Sylvain. The handsome young man travels to Saigon, finds the family and strikes up a friendship with Professor Hope.

Simone meets the much older André while she is still a child. The unlikely pair continues to meet off and on, in Saigon and Paris, as Simone grows into a beautiful teenaged girl. Simone and André's lives commingle in surprising ways. And yet, Simone suspects that she must find a way to disentangle from the Western influences that keep her mentally and emotionally in exile. She tries to prepare her husband for her inevitable departure.

Simone returns to her family's ruined estate and looks for true release from her emotional banishment. The dishevelment of the once rich countryside startles her. As she views the Vietnamese people's poverty, she tries to summon the courage and strong spirit of her great-grandmother, the orphan paddle girl. Will she find the way to reconnect with her family's roots? Will Simone be able to satisfy the restless spirits who haunt her dreams?

Most of us only know Vietnam through the eyes of young soldiers and war correspondents during the disastrous Vietnam War. I was engrossed by the saga of Simone's family history. The author is a natural storyteller who has long wanted to tell this story. And she succeeds in effectively presenting her country's culture and history, and the lives of Vietnamese women, to this Western reader.

Wildly Affordable Organic

2011-10-13T09:00:00.000-04:00

Nonfiction Finding your cooking comfort zone

WILDLY AFFORDABLE ORGANIC By Linda Watson
250 pp. Da Capo Press

Reviewed by Marty Carlock

One week into her experiment to cook cheap-but-healthy, Linda Watson's husband said the dreaded words: “Honey, we've got to talk.”

She feared her project was at an end. But he said, “I'm feeling really good…I don't think this should be a short experiment. This is how I want to live: on real food cooked from scratch.” They both noticed they had more energy, were sleeping less, easing toward their ideal weight, and generating lots less kitchen trash.

When I first saw Wildly Affordable Organic, I thought, who needs this? Books about eating organic and eating local (Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, Michael Pollan's An Omnivore's Dilemma, Lou Bendrick's Eat Where You Live, ad infinitum) have swamped the publishing industry of late. This writer can't have much to tell an experienced, parsimonious cook (your reviewer) who is also a committed locavore.

But let's admit it, to many of us who habitually try it, “fresh and organic” translates into “pricey.” Watson's contention is that eating healthy and local can be done without going to the market known as Whole Paycheck.

Watson had been perturbed by the prevailing idea that anybody on food stamps had to eat fattening, bad-for-you food. She set out to prove that people can find a healthy diet on the government food stamp allotment of $1.53 a meal per person. (She initially, rather disastrously, tried to do it on a dollar a meal, but adjusted to the standard for her state.)

The secret: there's no meat in her recipes.

Sounds awful, no? But Watson's menus include pie and cake, fresh organic produce, pizza, burritos, Asian noodles and the like.

Here's the rub: that phrase “cooked from scratch.” She makes her own bread, yogurt, pizza crust, hamburger buns, ice cream, and tortillas. Ironically, she does draw the line: “No crazy cooking. Homemade ravioli may be inexpensive, but it fails the reality test.”

I would have drawn the line much sooner. I have been known to make homemade bread, my own yogurt, soup from leftovers - even crêpes and tortillas. But unless you love being in the kitchen all day, life is too short.

It all sounds like a lot of labor for the cook. Watson counters that criticism by setting up menus complete with shopping lists and step-by-step how-tos. She argues she can cook the basics for a month in a (grueling) five-hour cooking marathon. Her schedules are calibrated to get the most out of the time the cook puts in. She'll give you a month's menus with grocery lists for mass-production stove time.

“You can go as organic and as local as your budget allows,” the author/cook advises. She might have added, “and your time/strength/commitment.” She makes a point of beginning the experiment while holding down a 9-to-5 job, to forestall the inevitable whine, “but you have more time.”

A secondary Watson rule is: use every scrap. This means making a week-long menu and sticking to it, no matter how much you may crave steak and potatoes by Wednesday. It also means keeping a sharp eye on leftovers - she maintains a broth jar for cooking water and a scrap jar in the freezer; the two when full yield ingredients for soup. It means having that extra slice of pizza for lunch, even though you are satiated on tomato sauce because you had pizza last night.

Watson cuts corners by doubling recipes and freezing meals. But how realistic is it to assume people on food stamps will own a slow-cooker, bread machine, food processor, ice cream machine and/or - most essential - a really big freezer? (Come to think of it, I don't have any of those things.) And how many food stamp recipients have a garden plot where they can harvest veggies, blueberries and figs, as she does?

Okay, the test of a cookbook is to make one of the recipes and see how it goes. I was intrigued by Proud Black-Bean Burgers (total time, an hour and 20 minutes) - they sound like a good alternative to Boca Burgers - until I noticed they included a prerequisite, Southern Summer Pesto (18 minutes). Not to mention Good Burger Buns (three hours). Many of Watson's stews and soups replicate things I already make, so no point in trying them. Her chocolate pudding looks easy, but with My-T-Fine at 99 cents a box, why bother?

Here, in any case, is a summary of one of the more interesting-looking recipes: Potato Peanut Curry. It involves simmering diced potatoes and canned tomatoes with a mix of oil, tahini, peanut butter, chipotle and turmeric. Serve on rice or as a flour tortilla wrap. Tahini is not a staple in my house, so for now this one is outside my cooking comfort zone.

Although Wildly Affordable Organic is somewhat redundant for me, it would be useful for somebody new to frugal cooking and healthy eating. I'm not throwing it out, though - not until I get some tahini and try this potato peanut curry.

Spinning the Law

2011-10-10T09:00:00.000-04:00

Nonfiction
Lose a case but keep face?

SPINNING THE LAW:
Trying Cases in the Court of Public Opinion
By Kendall Coffey
404 pp. Prometheus

Reviewed by Gilion Dumas

All lawyers love to tell war stories about their courtroom battles or other litigation skirmishes. Kendall Coffey has more than his fair share. Most lawyers will practice a lifetime and never, in the middle of finalizing a settlement agreement, be tear gassed by federal agents brandishing assault weapons. Or argue in court over the outcome of a presidential election. Or, for that matter, appear as a talking head on the Sunday news shows.

Coffey has done all these things and more, so with his experiences, it is easy to see why he wanted to write a book. It's not so easy to figure out what he wanted the book to say.

All non-fiction books need good introductions, and this one gets off on the wrong foot from the get-go by not having one. There is an introduction, but all it contains is a very general opening paragraph, followed by a short anecdote about one of Coffey's media-worthy cases.

The introduction should set out the author's thesis, explain something about the subject, give an outline of the book, provide some information on why the author is interested in the subject and qualified to write about it, and tell the reader what is unique about the author's take on the subject. This introduction provides the road map for the rest of the book. It allows the reader to take the information provided, analyze it to determine if it supports the author's thesis, and decide whether to agree or disagree with the author's conclusions.

Without a good introduction, the reader is left to wander, and wonder, alone, trying to figure out as the book unfolds just where the author is going and what he is trying to prove. The problem with Spinning the Law is that Coffey never makes this clear. It reads like all he wanted to spin were some yarns about his legal career, but was convinced he needed a bigger theme or to teach a lesson, so he grabbed the idea of “trying cases in the court of public opinion.”

When he sticks to his war stories, the book is good. Where it falls off is in the filler. Coffey stuffed in some chapters on famous legal cases in history (the trials of Socrates and Joan of Arc and the Lindbergh kidnapping) and famous modern cases (Martha Stewart's criminal trial). He salted distracting text boxes throughout the book that contained inane “Spinning Lessons” such as “police and prosecutors need each other - sometimes it is better to lose a case than to lose face with your teammates” or, even worse, “rather than cry over spilled milk, pour the next glass.”

If he had a thesis and made clear in the introduction what it was, maybe some of this filler would have made sense. Without knowing where Coffey was going, it was no more than distraction from some pretty interesting stories about his own career.

An Unexpected Light

2011-10-06T09:00:00.000-04:00

Nonfiction
Morning in Kabul

AN UNEXPECTED LIGHT:
Travels in Afghanistan
By Jason Elliot
483 pp. Picador

Reviewed by Diane Diekman

Jason Elliot first traveled from England to Afghanistan in 1979, at age nineteen, during the Soviet occupation. His second journey occurred after the Soviets had pulled out and the Afghans were fighting the Taliban. An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan is a travelogue of three journeys, each ten years apart, interspersed with history and literature from centuries past. “I have to go back to when I was twelve years old,” he writes, “my mind spinning from a turn-of-the-century account I'd just read of an explorer's travels through what was then Turkestan, to which the northern portion of what is now Afghanistan belonged. The names meant very little to me then, but I felt the living image of them nonetheless, and longed to know if the descriptions I had read were real.”

The adventure of the first trip drew him back again, with the premise of writing a book about the Afghan people. He explains to guide Ali Khan, “I would like to write about your country and its people, something about the Afghan character; their hospitality, for example.” The guide asks how much “your government” was paying him, and Elliot says it came out of his own pocket. Elliot tells the reader, “In my own language this was generally understood to mean I was forking out money on a horribly tight budget. But to Ali Khan the notion of a man paying his own way for a journey suggested almost limitless resources of wealth and leisure.”

An Unexpected Light recounts Elliot's travels, alone or with guides, on foot and on horseback, via broken-down trucks and buses, and eventually flying in a small plane. Kabul serves as the center from where he ventures forth on his explorations. The similarity of his journeys, with months and years seldom mentioned, results in a blur of repetitious events. He does, however, offer the reader the history of each area. For example, he introduces Panjshir as “one of Afghanistan's most important valleys and a conduit of trade and communication for millennia, it snakes nearly a hundred miles to the northeast from Gulbahar towards a tangle of high peaks near the Anjoman Pass in Badakhshan province.” He then describes Soviet offenses there and compares them to British tactics used just as unsuccessfully a century earlier. A quote from Rudyard Kipling's “The Young British Soldier” illustrates his point.

The “unexpected light” refers to Kabul's morning sunshine, which Elliot and an unidentified companion experienced while wandering lost through the streets. He says, “Under its spell the landscape seemed to dance on the very edge of materiality. The light was joined in a gentle conspiracy with the air itself, which whispered in the leaves above our heads, tinged with a faint scent of balsam.”

My expectation in reading this book was to learn about current life in Afghanistan. Instead, it's a reissue of a 1999 copyright, with the only indication being “With a New Afterword” on the front cover. I read the entire book looking for updates and insights on what has happened in the ten years of United States involvement, but there are none. I expected at least a chapter to bring the reader up to date. What I learned in the six-page afterword was “no end in sight.” Had this been a new volume, my review would have included more about the author's precise descriptions and political interactions. But I kept wondering what was the point of releasing a new edition with information more than a decade old.

For those interested in a picturesque look at the Afghan people and countryside, along with a history of the country and its literature, it's a good read. But those who want to know what Afghanistan is like today must search elsewhere.

The House of Wisdom

2011-10-03T09:00:00.000-04:00

Nonfiction A golden age of knowledge

THE HOUSE OF WISDOM:
How Arabic Science Saved Ancient
Knowledge and Gave Us the Renaissance By Jim Al-Khalili
302 pp. The Penguin Press

Reviewed by Nick Catalano

It is fair to say that even highly educated westerners know virtually nothing about a great eastern classical renaissance that occurred in Muslim lands from the 9th to the 11th centuries. Centered in Baghdad, this phenomenon featured a flood of astronomers, mathematicians, physicians, and philosophers who embraced the Greek legacy of Aristotle, Pythagoras, Archimedes, and Hippocrates while it was being buried in the dark ages of medieval Europe.

This western Asian golden age was propelled by the Qur'an (in the early stages of the rise of Islam), which saw no conflict between religion and science. By contrast, early Christianity railed against classical Greco-Roman rationalism while successfully launching faith-based feudalism--a belief system that would prevail for a thousand years. In the fourth century, St. Augustine stated that curiosity was a “disease which drives us to try and discover the secrets of nature, those secrets which are beyond our understanding, which can avail us nothing and which man should not wish to learn.”

The enmity between Islam and Christianity was so deep that in the west that this Asian golden age was treated as if it never existed, while in the east later European achievements were similarly ignored. History has lied to both cultures, and we now live in dangerous ignorance of each other's past accomplishments.

Jim Al Khalili, an Iraqi-born physicist living in Britain and a professed atheist, has written about this Asian golden age and its heroes in a book which revises history and sets the record straight. In The House of Wisdom we learn of such Arab geniuses as Abu Ali al Hussein ibn Sina (Avicenna), whom the author ranks as the greatest philosopher between Aristotle and Descartes, and Abu Ali al-Hassan ibn al-Haytham, whom he names the greatest physicist between Archimedes and Newton. Al- Khalili also gives long-overdue examination to the notable Aristotelian philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroes), and to al-Biruni, a seminal astronomer.

Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd were so pivotal that Dante, writing in 14th century Christian Italy, places them along with the great Islamic leader Saladin in limbo alongside Aristotle, Hippocrates, and Galen. Dante is writing after the Crusades are finished, so the horrible void between east and west was yet to come. It was the last thousand years that virtually evaporated any meaningful awareness that east and west had of each other's culture--an amazing vacuum which has contributed to the terrible tragedies of contemporary terrorism.

In such a light, The House of Wisdom contains revisionist history of the best kind. In addition to devoting whole chapters to the great Islamic scientists and philosophers and explaining in careful detail the nature of their specific contributions, Al- Khalili shows us the world of the great Caliph Al-Ma'mun, who arrived in Baghdad in 819 A. D. and transformed the city into a great cultural capital. He analyzes the great “translation movement” instituted by the Abbasid caliphs that resulted in a renaissance of Greek science and philosophy. He demonstrates how it was the Arabic translations of the original Greek that aided later Europeans in their own translating efforts of the ancients.

Al-Khalili acknowledges that his reference of this classical golden age as an achievement of Arabic science falls short of the mark. It fails to account for the contributions of the many Persian and Turkic figures such as the Persian astrologer Al-Balkhi, the Persian mathematician Al-Biruni, and the Turkish philosopher Al-Farabi. Much later, the Turkic grandson of Timur Ulugh Beg continued the great tradition of Asian astronomy with his world-class observatory in Samarkand. All of these ethnicities lived under the umbrella of Islam, so “Islamic golden age” might be a better description than “Arabic science.”

But this difficulty does not compromise Al-Khalili's achievement. It merely indicates that the west's ignorance of eastern cultural and scientific history needs a great deal of investigation before the full record is understood. The House of Wisdom is an excellent primer.

West of Here

2011-09-29T09:00:00.000-04:00

Fiction Paper People in the Great Northwest

WEST OF HERE By Jonathan Evison
480 pp. Algonquin (Workman)

Reviewed by Marty Carlock

Jonathan Evison puts us on notice right away that this is going to be a great sprawling epic novel by introducing an entire cast of characters: Hoka, a Klallam Indian woman; her mute son, Thomas Jefferson King; her alcohol-ravaged father; Indian George; James Mather, a rugged, hulking explorer; Eva Lambert, a woman looking for fulfillment as a journalist; saloon-keeper, pimp and bad guy John Tobin; reluctant pioneer Ethan Thornburgh; failed local Krigstadt, whose primary purpose in life is trying to encounter Bigfoot. Or Bigfeet. Later we will encounter a parole-jumper named Timmon Tillman and his big-hearted black parole officer, Franklin Bell, the most believable character in the whole crew.

There are more, such as the members of Mather's expedition who are so sketchily drawn we can't keep them straight. Adding to the confusion are frequent changes in point of view and, finally, time-travel plotting that skips back and forth between 1890 and 2006, with an occasional backtrack to 1887. Most enigmatic (read: annoying) is a character who seems to have existence in both eras, the mixed-blood mute boy who is called Thomas in 1890 and Curtis in 2006.

The locale is a settlement on the northern rim of the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state. Evison calls it Port Bonita; in many places he uses real place names, enabling us to pinpoint Port Bonita as what is today known as Port Angeles. I'm an aficionada of historical novels that are close enough to actuality to teach us something about the place and time. Here, although it's clear Evison has done extensive research, the book is murky about fiction and actuality. Was there really a Mather expedition? (I'm guessing there was.) Was there a Thornburgh or equivalent who dammed the Elwha River and brought electricity to this remote place? Was the town destroyed by fire? Was Thomas/Curtis responsible; if so, how and why?

The story rollicks along, but as soon as we get interested in one plot, Evison shifts gears and starts in on another. I found myself not caring a whit about any of the characters. They have all the dimension of paper dolls, shuffled about to illustrate this or that about early Port Bonita. It doesn't help that their dialogue has the sparkle of a dirty sock.

Most of the time the writing style doesn't help. Evison takes glee in presenting character traits in an obscure way, challenging the reader to puzzle it out. We've heard of Krig, just barely, when a chapter starts this way:

Report 1017 (class B)/Year 2006/Season: Spring/State: Washington/County: Clallam/Nearest town: Port Bonita/Nearest Road: Elwha River Road. OBSERVED: The following events happened roughly two miles above the Thornburgh Dam along the Crooked Thumb trail, the first week of April 2006. This area has had a lot of sightings (mostly class B) over the past several years, so I was not completely surprised by the events of that night. In fact, my purpose out there was to call-blast after dark (using uncompressed digital recordings of the Snohomish Whoop-Howl and Del Norte calls), employing a Peavey JSX 212 cabinet and a 120-watt Joe Satriani Signature Head...

Elsewhere there is worse prose:

Ethan huddled beneath his wool blankets, hopelessly alert, still clutching his rifle with his good hand. What howling beast of the night was this that spoke in guttural tongues and circled the inside of his head? What frame of mind was this that could not distinguish the real from the imagined? And what exhilarating new fear was this that defied expression?

Sometimes if we try hard we can take some of such musings for irony - there are flashes of wit, and merciless parody of social mores - yet Evison's ever-present adverbs are tiring.

Then again Evison is capable of nice passages:

They proceeded south along the ridge, switchbacking up the steep incline over rutty terrain until the trail emerged above the tree line on a bald narrow crest facing west. Nothing had prepared Franklin for the terrifying splendor that greeted him there. Across the wedge-shaped valley below him, beyond yet another green valley, a jagged row of snowcapped peaks were strung out in a crescent, surrounding one mountain so broad and massive that its craggy white face dwarfed the others. A shiver ran up Franklin's neck at the sight of it all. Suddenly the middle of nowhere seemed boundless.

Evison's pitfall is that he has started with the history and applied appropriate characters as needed. He has a collage instead of a story line. Had I not been reviewing the book, I would have lost patience and tossed it after 50 pages. Eventually I was glad I hadn't, for as things come to a head late in the novel, we are treated to a coherent and enjoyable segment. Parole officer Bell, a tubby middle-ager totally ignorant of backpacking, hikes into the wilds carrying canned Chunky soup (forgetting the can-opener) and other greenhorn paraphenalia. He's on the trail of Timmon Tillman; he thinks Tillman is salvageable if he'll just stick to the rules for a while. (I honestly don't know how he has come to this conclusion, as Tillman is among the poorly delineated cardboard figures peopling this book.) There is humor, narrative and suspense here, and description of the landscape by one who has seen it. Too bad this writer didn't produce the entire book in the same way.

Keeping Your Child in Mind

2011-09-26T09:00:00.000-04:00

Nonfiction
Helping a child's learning

KEEPING YOUR CHILD IN MIND:
Overcoming Defiance, Tantrums, and Other Everyday Behavior Problems by Seeing the World through Your Child's Eyes
By Claudia M. Gold, M.D.
240 pp. Da Capo Lifelong Books

Reviewed by Karna Converse

“When you think about your child's experience from the child's perspective, you help your child learn to regulate emotions, solve problems, and adapt to the complex social world,” writes Dr. Claudia Gold in Keeping Your Child in Mind.

Gold calls the philosophy “holding a child in mind” and is a proponent of research conducted by D. W. Winnicott, the British pediatrician-turned-psychoanalyst who coined the phrase “holding environment” in the mid-1960s. The components, she says, are:

Understanding behavior in terms of the child's stage of development
Showing empathy
Containing and regulating emotions while not being overwhelmed

In Keeping Your Child in Mind, Gold combines the latest research in child behavior with stories drawn from her parenting experiences and her 20+ years as a pediatrician. The book is organized so parents can easily turn to the chapter that addresses a child's specific age and developmental issue, e.g. colic (newborns), managing sleep (infants), setting limits (toddlers), separation anxiety (preschoolers), social challenges (school-age children), and searching for identify (teenagers).

Gold has a friendly writing style and impressive credentials, but I found myself skimming through much of the narrative, wondering if the text had been transcribed directly from a presentation, her clinical dictations, or a journal article - and with little revision for parents who “Google” for answers.

Don't get me wrong: I wasn't looking for bullet points; the back cover clearly states this is not a how-to book. I think her “holding a child in mind” approach makes a lot of sense. I'm just not convinced her primary audience is parents.

It's obvious she's excited about the research. In fact, she writes on her blog about her longing “to communicate to my pediatric colleagues, who are on the front lines with young children and families, not only this new knowledge, but also the way I was able to use these ideas every day in my pediatric practice with such powerful results.”

Keeping Your Child in Mind does this and should receive a warm welcome from the medical community. I suspect, however, that parents would reap more benefits from following her blog than adding this paperback to their bookshelf.

Links:

City of Gold

2011-09-22T09:00:00.000-04:00

Nonfiction
Everything but happiness

City of Gold:
Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism
By Jim Krane
319 pp. Picador/St. Martin's Press

Reviewed by Loretta Carrico-Russell

Journalist Jim Krane's City of Gold is the untold story of Dubai's transformation into the city-state it is today. A skillful storyteller, Krane writes Dubai's story and that of the formation of the United Arab Emirates, which sits on the southeastern corner of Arabia, considered the most desolate of the region. The United Arab Emirates, formerly part of the Trucial States, sits on the Persian Gulf, close to the Strait of Hormuz, its water so thick with salt a person could take naps on it.

Much has been written about modern-day Dubai, but Krane takes the reader back to the city-state's first recorded history 1800. His historical concentration centers around 1833 when the tiny, isolated group of Dubaians living a bleak existence was taken over by the Maktoum family, an autocracy that has governed the state for the past 175 years. The early sheikhs, especially Maktoum and Rashid, were brilliant in their vision and foresight for how they led their countrymen out of their desert dwelling, mud huts and laid the foundation for today's Dubai. “An American might say Rashid offered Dubaians a hand up, not a hammock,” Krane writes.

The leaders of this small city-state all worked toward the goal of improving the lives of the citizens first through financial contracts with other countries and then through oil. In 1900, after the Persians raised taxes in Iranian ports, Sheikh Maktoum launched a plan to make Dubai the most business-friendly port in the lower gulf by turning Dubai into a free port with the elimination of the 5 percent customs duty and slashing fees. He also sent representatives to lure the biggest merchants into moving to Dubai with gifts of free land, guarantees of a friendly government and “a hands-off government policy,” a practice that continues to this day. Dubai's current sheikh, Sheikh Mohammed, established tax-free zones for corporations, no taxes are collected on income, property or corporations, but there is a consumption tax of sorts, an import tax, permit fees, road tolls, and a regressive apartment and office renter's tax.

Today's Dubai is far from its humble beginnings, and Krane clearly has the utmost respect for its people. With this in mind, he uses universal examples affecting Dubai and other parts of the world:

Dubai, like old Venice, survives as an island of enlightenment in a sea of religious fundamentalism. Both cities provoked a backlash for their tolerance. Venice was pilloried by the papacy for trading with Muslims. Dubai gets excoriated by Muslim hardliners for catering to Christians.

Closer to home, Dubai, before the economic meltdown that sent migrant workers home by the thousands, was battling its own immigrant backlash. Those who built the skyscrapers with antiquated tools were met with xenophobic hostility instead of gratitude. Emiratis were quoted as saying their way of life was threatened, jobs were scarce and housing limited due to the foreigners. “The people coming here are buying houses and they're buying everything.” Elders worry about today's excesses on the children of Dubai. One mother lamented, “Now nothing makes you happy. Before, you could buy one mobile phone and you are happy. Now you buy five mobile phones in a year and you're not happy. There is nothing making people happy now. Children have so many things in the house, but they are bored.”

What makes this book worth reading is Krane's handling of the information. As a true journalist, Krane gives both sides of the story: the impressive leadership and the ugly side of the blatant disregard for life. Indians, Pakistanis and other immigrants risked life and limb to build the city-state's tallest buildings without the safeguards used in other countries. Sex slavery became rampant as desperate women from poorer countries flocked to Dubai under the assumption they were being hired for jobs such as waitressing. The environment, current flows, wildlife, and endangered breeding grounds were decimated to create the palm islands and different construction projects. The city was being built without a functioning master plan to guide its course. The resources it will take to run this city-state will continue to negatively impact the environment. Dubai is out of oil and is now mining for coal.

What Dubai will ultimately be remembered for is its excess. The year 2009 will be remembered in Dubai as the great unraveling. The city-state lay exposed to the ravages of the global recession and, worse, it fell into a debt trap of its own creation.

The Double Happiness Company

2011-09-19T09:00:00.001-04:00

Fiction
Where the hurt is

The Double Happiness Company
By Anne Aylor
286 pp. BareBone Books

Reviewed by Bob Sanchez

The Double Happiness Company is one of the best novels I've read in a while.

Katie Rivers has loved ballet since she was five years old in the dusty nothing-town of Fortuna, New Mexico (“10,154 friendly people and a few soreheads”). As she grows up in the 1960s and '70s, she dreams of a career as a ballerina and pours heart and soul into perfecting her skills. But ballet is only appropriate for little girls, and in time her mother Lola wants her to move on. Lola had never realized her own dreams and now projects hers on Katie: to go to college and have a career. Strong-willed Katie wants to skip college and become a professional ballerina. Their competing aspirations set up a powerful mother-daughter conflict as Lola wields a poisonous mixture of love and verbal abuse. Katie's more easygoing father Haywood generally obeys Lola, who threatens him with “no mattress mambo tonight” if he sides with Katie. All he wants is to make his family lighten up and laugh at his countless stupid jokes. (What does Mrs. Claus call her husband's helpers? Subordinate Clauses.) Katie both loves and hates her family, but mostly she feels trapped by them and by her town. With her obvious talent, she is determined to launch her career in New York, but an injured knee threatens to change everything. As she recuperates she gains weight--a lot of weight--and Lola shows her little mercy.

Meanwhile, another family battle brews under the surface. Katie's younger brother Rhett quietly wonders what to do if he gets a draft notice. The Vietnam War is the one subject that can rile Haywood. Every self-respecting young man should serve, and those lily-livered commie draft dodgers have his full contempt.

The Double Happiness Company is much more serious than Haywood might have you think. Author Anne Aylor, a New Mexico native and former professional dancer who has lived in London for decades, writes beautifully and in detail about ballet and the tortuous effort and dedication it requires. But if ballet is the framework of this story, dreams are both its core and the wedge that threatens to destroy the Rivers family. Rhett tells Katie that “if you know where home is, you know everything.” Yet Katie's passion and her desperate desire to get the hell out of Fortuna and away from her mother bring out the theme that “home is where the hurt is.”

Letters from an Unknown Woman

2011-09-15T09:00:00.000-04:00

Fiction
Tastes like chicken

Letters from an Unknown Woman
By Gerard Woodward

339 pp. Arcade Publishing
Reviewed by Loretta Carrico-Russell

Coming of age stories are common, but seldom has a story involved an adult and been written by the opposite sex. In Letters from an Unknown Woman, author Gerard Woodward captures the angst of a woman living in 1940s Victorian England. Tory Pace lived with her mother, Mrs. Head, as she insisted upon being called, outside London while her three children were evacuated to the countryside and her husband was a German prisoner of war.

At first blush, Letters from an Unknown Woman reads as a humorous tale, but the surface humor gives way to the depths of Woodward's writing. The butcher shop in the village where Tory and her mother lived was bombed during the only raid to impact their area. Among the debris, Mrs. Head finds a roast. Looking to ensure no one notices, she slips the undetermined meat into her grocery basket and returns home to cook it for dinner. Tory questions her mother about how they could be sure it was pork joint and not Mr. Dando, the butcher. They can't, but they eat it anyway. Living on rations during war time makes people things they won't ordinarily do, and Woodward shows this:

You know how difficult it is to come by good meat, Tory, and now that Dando has gone, we need to make the best of what we can get. This may be the last piece of decent meat we see for a very long time. And you can rest assured that I would never knowingly eat someone ...

The core of the story centers on a request made by Donald, Tory's husband, for risqué letters. He pressures prim and proper Tory into eventually finding a way to comply. Donald's request and the possible eating of Mr. Dando's lower thigh joint has interesting consequences not only for Tory, but more so for Mrs. Head. It seems that while both mother and daughter view each other as prudish, they react to Donald's request in the same manner; though Tory blamed Donald, Mrs. Head blamed the eating of Mr. Dando for the letters she wrote to her former neighbor in Westminster.

Woodward leaves the reader wanting more, including an explanation of the suicide of Tory and Donald's eldest child, Tom. Within the context of the story, the sudden death seems out of place. If it is meant to show Tory's passivity and the detriment of siding with a spouse, who may have thought he was doing the right thing for his son by securing him an apprenticeship when the child wanted to continue his education, it doesn't. Woodward captures Tory's meekness and submissiveness in her amusing attempts to fulfill Donald's demands for sexy letters, which he doesn't want for himself, but for bartering; and in her taking employment in a women's lavatory when Donald refuses to find legitimate work of his own. Woodward has the gift for twisting the reader's emotions with his prose. Prior to Tom's suicide, he gives to his younger brother, in a tender scene, his most valuable possession: a chewed pencil from the girl he loves.

Woodward is best known as a prize-winning poet, and he has easily made the transition to master story teller. His poetry captures a character's essence in just a few words.

Postcards from Nam

2011-09-12T09:00:00.000-04:00

Buy this book

Fiction
Releasing the music of language

Postcards from Nam
By Uyen Nicole Duong
Amazon Encore
Reviewed by Ann Hite

Postcards from Nam is a stirring, haunting book. Mimi is a Vietnamese refugee who at the age of twelve escapes the fall of Saigon in April of 1975 by securing a place on one of the overcrowded American transport planes. Her father secures the family's passage to the United States from their refugee camp in Thailand. Over the years in her new life, Mimi sheds her Vietnamese name and childhood memories. She is the poster child for living the American dream and grows up to attend Harvard Law School.

Then the postcards arrive one at a time: handmade paper with intricate drawings, both disturbing and beautiful at the same time. Always they are postmarked Bangkok and signed Nam. Mimi begins her quest to discover who Nam is and what he wants from her.

In one of Mimi's childhood memories, we see her only a year or so before the fall of Saigon. She stands in the public hospital--not a place her family is accustomed to--waiting to hear of her mother's condition after a terrible miscarriage. Women are lined up on the floor in different stages of labor. Ms. Duong takes readers into the emergency room where they can smell the scent of birth, feel the heat of the bodies, and see the pain on the faces of the women.

Finally the news comes that Mimi's mother will survive with a blood transfusion. The blood--a rare type of her country--is donated by an African American soldier. Mimi's grandmother begins a campaign to discover his identity:

My grandmother kept on asking. She wanted the soldier's identity even if he had died. She would keep his name, age, and hometown on the family's altar and burn an incense stick for him every day. The medical interns did not take her seriously. What was wrong with this country, she complained. So much had happened in the war people had forgotten the importance of gratitude.

Postcards from Nam not only takes the reader into Saigon's war years, but just as importantly deals with the survivors and their memories. The author gives us a looking glass through which to view the culture then and now. The beauty and violence becomes a metaphor for the stories that insist on being told as if they have lives of their own.

This moving novella is proof of how important short fiction is to our literary world. I strongly recommend readers to purchase this book and release the music of this language into the world.

A Song in My Heart

2011-09-09T09:00:00.000-04:00

Fiction
Vibrant history, savory sound

A Song in My Heart
By Roma Calatayud-Stocks
348 pp. Beaver's Pond Press

Reviewed by Susan Dusterhoft

Is it luck or fate to be born into a life of privilege? Whatever the case, any child born in the early 1900s was fortunate to have opportunities that many families today cannot provide. Alejandra Sanford was one such child.

A Song in My Heart, by Roma Calatayud-Stocks, is the story of Ale, as she is known to her friends and family, who is born to bicultural and artistic parents. The novel chronicles her life from the point when her Mexican mother Lidia and her American father Edward meet in Paris during the 1900 World's Fair up to Ale's early adulthood. Her life is a musical journey to becoming an orchestral conductor. Accompanying the book, and something I have never seen before, is an audio CD with original musical scores to accompany various sections of the novel.

A Song in My Heart will surely please any history aficionado and is brimming with music and art references that simply cannot be ignored, as they are an integral component and inspiration to the story. Without them, the novel would be lackluster. The details, researched to perfection, are woven throughout and allowing the reader to stand right alongside Alejandra.

Experiencing Ale's world for the first time, I was instantly drawn into the story. Getting lost in the vivid descriptions of the Mexican culture as well as the beautiful images of Paris and beyond, we see Alejandra's musical life story seamlessly interwoven and leaping from the pages. Did the author herself long to have lived during this time period? I know that I wished to have been there myself as Alejandra finds melodic inspiration in everything she saw. Ms. Calatayud-Stocks describes perfectly how Ale composes :

Her fingers moved slowly at first, improvising, until the piece began to take shape; then the melody and tempo of the composition soon reached a crescendo, and the lively rhythm, full of energy, marked the pace, as if the notes played against the castanets.

To grow up and face love, independence, and other life challenges is difficult, but to do it back in the 1920s was even more so, especially for a woman. However, Alejandra was steadfast in her pursuit of musical passions. No disapproval from her father or decisions made for her by a well-intentioned beau will stop Alejandra from realizing her dreams, which evolved from learning the piano to composing to becoming a conductor.

How lucky for Alejandra that her mother Lidia, a gifted painter, loved music so much! Yet her father Edward's interest in technology and the excitement of discovery hopes to impart upon his only daughter's heart that anything is possible.

When she becomes old enough, Ale leaves the comforts of her Minneapolis home and travels to New York with her parents so she can begin formal training at the Institute of Music. Fortunately, the people she meets along her journey play an integral role in fulfilling her dreams. With these new found friends she learns to perform as a part of a group, hones her skills as a musician, and faces challenges. But following her studies at the Institute, which ultimately becomes the famous Julliard School, she travels with her family back to Mexico. On one special evening, after listening to her mother's most favorite symphony, Alejandra realizes that she should never give up on her dreams.

This book is not a casual summer read. Rather, it is meant to be read slowly and savored. I will at return to it when I can lose myself again in the rich and vibrant history woven and listen in rapture to Roma's musical accompaniments. Given the volume of details, I can truly appreciate the fact that Ms. Calatayud-Stocks took almost ten years to complete this story!

Ghost on Black Mountain

2011-09-07T07:00:00.000-04:00

Fiction

The haints come marching in

Ghost on Black Mountain
By Ann Hite
329 pp. Gallery Books

Reviewed by Sue Ellis

Southern Gothic isn't my favorite genre, so I was a little standoffish with the first chapter of Ghost on Black Mountain. Nellie Pritchard leapt onto the pages without much introduction. She simply was--a naive depression-era southern girl who fell hard for the wrong man. I was impatient with her and foresaw a bad ending just as her mama was doing. And then it dawned on me--I was already into the story--up to my neck.

Ann Hite writes breathlessly, as if the characters all speak to her at once. Many of them have second sight, the ability to see or communicate with spirits, ghosts or 'haints', and so the cast expands from beyond the grave. Here is a sampling of the people who join Nellie on the pages of the book:

Josie Clay: Nellie's mother, whose own marriage was short of ideal, who saw trouble when she read tea leaves, then braced herself to be the support her daughter would eventually need.

Hobbs Pritchard: Nellie's new husband, whose violent temper and murderous past would be dealt with in a way no one could have fathomed.

Rose Gardner: Hobbs's girlfriend, who waits as a kept woman while Hobbs plays house with his toy bride. She is helplessly propelled into a new life when she's left alone with a son to raise.

Shelly Parker: the girl Hobbs hires to help his young wife set up housekeeping. Imagine her surprise when she discovers Nellie has second sight just as she does, but that her warnings fall on deaf ears because of Nellie's refusal to see Hobbs or the spirits for what they are.

Iona Harbor: A girl determined to go her own way and live out a legacy she doesn't even know exists.

Here's an excerpt from the day Nellie realizes the scope of her mistake and pines for her mother:

My garden plot was rocky and hard to turn with a hoe. I worked the dirt, warmed by the sun, with my whole body and mind. The movement kept the images of home from creeping into my thoughts like some sweet dream that I'd have to wake up from. Each time my hoe hit a clod of dirt, I became part of the land, the air, and the mountain itself. I was lost to the heart that drove me to marry. The woods were silent and alive. That's what I loved about gardening, seedlings sprouting through the dirt, a promise that all things can grow. Hobbs wasn't capable of loving me. With this thought, I turned into a woman. The price of two simple words--I will--was too high. The dark rich earth yielded to the hoe. The sun sank into the tops of the trees, and a chill spread through me. I scooped up a fistful of dirt. Love was not simple. Love wasn't something I could count on to save me. Love was a story in a book that would never be written by me. I stood there until I could barely see my hand in front of my face.

Ghost on Black Mountain is a sometimes shocking tale of meanness, desperation, and redemption. The mountain people, both good and bad, who make up the community around Nellie come across as completely authentic. It's a book that's hard to put down once you've begun reading, and it doesn't disappoint at the end.

Pretty Boy

2011-09-05T07:00:00.000-04:00

Nonfiction
The killer and the myth

PRETTY BOY:

The Life and Times of Charles Arthur Floyd

By Michael Wallis

505 pp. W. W. Norton

Reviewed by Robert Sinsheimer

A few weeks back, Michael Wallis's Pretty Boy landed on my desk. It's the story of a renowned depression-era bootlegger and bank robber.

Almost simultaneously with the book's arrival, a media frenzy over another renowned gangster engulfed my hometown of Boston, Massachusetts. Whitey Bulger, the role model for Jack Nicholson's character in The Departed, was caught after 16 years on the lam. At 81, he was doomed to spend his remaining years behind bars, but he had sixteen younger ones living with his girlfriend in anonymous luxury on the California coast. More than a few local winter sufferers might take that trade.

Pretty Boy Floyd had no such luck. A few months after his thirtieth birthday, a mob of law enforcement officers gunned him down in an Ohio field and then bickered for decades over who should be credited with the kill. He had fulfilled a vow never to be taken alive.

This is where Wallis's book begins, with a vivid account of Floyd's execution. The book then segues into a dry recitation of Floyd's sorry life, told more or less chronologically. The early chapters of the book are filled with excessive detail. Did you know Pretty Boy Floyd's Aunt Susan was born on January 21, 1899? Neither did I. Whether to spice the dryness or to capture the depression-era ethos, bad metaphors abound. Cotton pickers worked harder than “an oil field whore on payday.” Just how hard is that? Not sure I want to know.

In this manner, Wallis recounts Floyd's unremarkable but dirt-poor upbringing in pre-depression Georgia and Oklahoma, his first forays into crime, his time served in the Missouri state penitentiary, and his evolution into a Kansas City dandy. Such detail buttresses Wallis credential as a historian and thus enhances his credibility when he tackles the true remaining controversy over Floyd's life, his alleged role in the so-called Kansas City Massacre.

This is the real benefit of Wallis's book. Floyd probably killed five fewer people than the F.B.I. wants us to believe. On June 13, 1933, four law enforcement officers and a prisoner were gunned down in broad day light on a Kansas City street. This event stunned even a depression-weary nation. The F.B.I. immediately anointed Floyd, already a wanted fugitive, as one of the shooters. Floyd was thus doomed; his public execution occurred on October 22, 1934.

Wallis's careful review of the evidence concludes that Floyd probably was not involved in the Kansas City murders. Floyd's alleged involvement was a foil to promote J. Edgar Hoover's career advancement. To this day, the F.B.I. tells the story of the courageous agents who took out Pretty Boy, perpetrator of the Kansas City Massacre. Wallis's digging serves as a reminder that the F.B.I. is Hoover's legacy, so its institutional self-promotion is never to be trusted.

Reading Pretty Boy while being bombarded with the media's Bulger mania reinforced an odd facet of American culture: we sure love our outlaw stories, especially the ones paired with the Robin Hood myth. Both Pretty Boy and Whitey cultivated the reputation of gentleman rogues. In both cases, it was a lie. Whitey is accused of 19 murders. It's not exactly clear how many people “Pretty Boy” killed, but perhaps 10 or more apart from the five for which he was falsely blamed.

Even so, Pretty Boy's Robin Hood myth has survived. In 1939, five years after Floyd's killing, Woody Guthrie wrote "The Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd:"

Now as through this life I've wandered

I've seen lots of funny men

Some will rob you with a six-gun

and some with a fountain pen.

Unlike Whitey, a full-service mobster, Pretty Boy focused primarily on bootlegging and bank robbery. He was damned good at both although it was a helluva lot easier to rob a bank on the Plains in the 1930s than it is now. There were no exploding dye packs, no video surveillance, no police helicopters with searchlights to track you. If you had a fast car and a decent rifle, you could grab the cash and drive off into the sagebrush. Chances were, the sheriff wouldn't even chase you past the county line.

Cognizant of Floyd's reputation as a depression-era Robin Hood, Pretty Boy is inconsistent. Intended as clinical history, it shifts at times into romanticism.

Meanwhile, Whitey's attempt at the Robin Hood legacy is also a parable of F.B.I. dysfunction. Whitey got away because a corrupt agent tipped him off. The corrupt agent was caught and went to jail himself. Now, the agency loves to brag about how they had the guts to bag one of their own.

As for Pretty Boy the man, his cold story is just ugly. In the end, Wallis's history debunks the myth, as it must. It may be unfair to Wallis, but truth be told, all I ever really wanted to know about Pretty Boy I learned from Woody Guthrie:

Now as through this life I wander

As through this world I roam

I have never seen an outlaw

Drive a family from its home.

Defining Zach

2011-09-01T07:00:00.000-04:00

FICTION
Unruly teens and guardian angels

Defining Zach
By Vonda Frampton
196 pp. Xlibris

Reviewed by Madison Bush

There is something about Vonda Frampton's Defining Zach that isn't quite believable. The book's premise sets out to show us a crucial few months in the life of middle school student Zach Patterson. The story is told from Zach's viewpoint, but the tone of the work makes him sound more like an adult than a teenage boy. Zach keeps up a lively analysis of the world around him, noticing and commenting on things that no middle school boy ever would. The events of these months teach him to be a more responsible person, to see people for who they are, not who they pretend to be, and that he is special just the way he is. These morals are all very strong, and I certainly approve of them in any young adult novel, but the author has thrown so many issues into the book that you forget what she is actually trying to show you.

Zach and his dad, Mitch Patterson the ex-marine, have a very strong relationship. Their interactions are actually the best part of the book, showing the love and respect they have for each other along with the realistic points when Zach's dad has to discipline his unruly son. Zach's hero worship for his father, occasionally tempered by typical teenage angst stands out as the most relatable part of the narration. Zach and his mom however, have a terrible relationship. His mom, Liz Patterson, is agoraphobic, although this never really shows itself, and according to Zach, she doesn't love him at all. He continuously says he wants his mom to at least care, even if she won't show him the same amount of affection as she has for her younger son, Lewis. There are a lot of contradictions between Mitch and Liz, who apparently don't talk about anything. For example, we learn early on that Mr. Keening, their neighbor, is a Bad Guy, something known by everyone, especially Zach's dad. However when Zach and his mom see Mr. Keening exiting a sex toys shop, all Liz can say is that she always thought he seemed like such a nice man. Zach's closest confidante, who gets dragged on most his adventures, is his nine year old brother Lewis. Lewis is a sweet kid, who loves his older brother, and becomes a target of the school bully as a way to get to Zach. Lewis is another great character, second only to Zach's father.

Meanwhile Zach's uncle is apparently a womanizer and a cheater, and he and his wife, Aunt Cora, are going through a divorce. The divorce turns their son Joel, Zach's cousin, against his mother, which upsets Zach who has a longstanding crush on his Aunt. Yes, a crush on his aunt. Now, I was never a teenage boy, but I always viewed my aunts and uncles as family, aka not even remotely acceptable to crush on whether or not they are blood related. I'm not quite sure what purpose the divorce served in helping the story, besides making Zach and his Dad closer.

The antagonist here is Gary Keening, the middle school bully. When he's first introduced, Zach informs us that his father is rich and powerful, so the adults don't stop Gary from doing whatever he wants. Zach, tired of being the target of Gary's bullying starts doing stunts to gain popularity. When he jumps off the ski jump on a toboggan he impresses everyone, but this doesn't last long as Gary starts terrorizing him even more. After a few chapters we find out Gary's a pot dealer, and then we find out he does cocaine (yes he is a middle school student), and then we find out he might be bullying his own sister with his giant dog Goliath. Zach hates him more and more, but refuses to tell his Dad about their feud, even when Gary leaves pot in Zach's gym bag in an attempt to frame him for drug dealing. At this point in the story, the angel appears.

After Zach's big stunt, which gets him in trouble with the law for trespassing, he is forced to volunteer at a senior citizen place. At first Zach freaks out, hating all the old people, but he forms a friendship with Mr. Fredericks, and eventually learns to appreciate the home. After meeting Mr. Fredericks he starts hearing the Voice, which at first he assumes is his conscience, but later learns is Mr. Fredericks' voice. When he goes to visit Mr. Fredericks, the nurse tells him that Mr. Fredericks is dying. Well Mr. Fredericks is dying, but he confesses to Zach that he's actually an angel, here to make sure nothing happens to Zach, Lewis, or Gary, whose fates are currently intertwined, and heading for disaster. Strangely enough, the angel didn't seem out of place, well not compared to the criminal fathers, child molesters, and coke-dealing twelve year olds.

Well, I won't ruin the ending, but everything comes down to a big dare, Gary's last attempt to destroy Zach once and for all, a big stunt that puts Gary, Lewis, and Zach in danger. I won't pretend I liked this book, but there were many pieces that made it readable. The plot, though twisted out of proportion, was interesting. The characters are varied and entertaining, despite being overdramatized. The morals are good, though fairly common in a coming of age story. At first I wasn't a fan of Zach, but he grows on you, and by the end I even liked him. My favorite part was the angel, as we could all use a little divine guidance in our lives, even a sarcastic curmudgeonly one like Zach's.

Clapton: The Ultimate Illustrated History

2011-08-29T07:00:00.001-04:00

NONFICTION

Would you know my name, if I saw you in heaven …

CLAPTON:
The Ultimate Illustrated History
By Chris Welch
256 pp. Voyageur Press

Reviewed by Gary Presley

Is it a sign of nostalgia that rock ‘n’ roll is now a fit subject for coffee table books? If so, English guitarist Clapton would be a good point to start a collection, especially for those of us yanked out of the 1950s by white artists latching onto the classic blues rhythm and accentuating its glory a danceable backbeat.

If you are a rock fan, or more precisely if you began listening to rock 'n' roll with Buddy Holly or at least with the Beatles, you have a list of guitar heroes. And “Slow Hand,” the prolific Eric Clapton, will be on most lists. Clapton may not be every fan’s favorite, but no one can listen to “Badge” or “Layla” and not recognize a man who soul makes the six strings sing. Proof? Eric Clapton is the only performer inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame three times--as a solo artist, as a member of Cream, and as a member of the Yardbirds.

Chris Welch’s book does Clapton justice. The book includes 400 photographs and eleven chapters that follow Clapton from his youth through the present day, including his work with the groups Cream, Yardbirds, and Derek and the Dominoes. For those youngsters who only recognize Clapton from his bearded, eye-glass-wearing “Tears of Heaven” days, the pictures of young Eric will be evidence of his decades of influence.

Welch is a long-time journalist on the music scene, and he is the author of a number of books on the subject. He first began writing for the magazine Melody Maker in 1964, and he has authored biographies of John Bonham, David Bowie, and Jimi Hendrix. And there is possibly no one better to approach this Clapton biography. Welch writes …

It was my first week at Melody Maker in 1964 when I met a young Mod named Eric Clapton who played guitar with “the latest pop group,” the Yardbirds.

Rock ‘n’ roll fans will appreciate the reproductions of concert posters and the appendices presenting the complete Clapton discography, but true fans will appreciate the insights into those great guitarists and blues artists who have influenced Clapton. There’s Buddy Guy, Howlin’ Wolf, Blind Willie Johnson, and the legendary Robert Johnson. Clapton has spoken of his connection to these men, “identifying with some, some kind of cry of suffering, yes--pain, because I had a very confused tumultuous childhood,” as he told David Frost in a 1994 television interview.

And Welch doesn’t flinch from the hard times that came later in Clapton’s life. There are the inevitable and difficult changes brought on by fame, changes that burned away Clapton’s ability to trust. There are the deaths of Duane Allman and Jimi Hendrix, both friends. And then there was the “complicated love affair” with the wife of George Harrison, Pattie Boyd, a woman Clapton eventually married. Clapton’s solution to the stress was rock ‘n’ roll cliché: alcohol and drugs, mainly the heroin that cost him two or three productive years in the early 1970s.

With that, we know this book isn’t a hagiography, but a prospective reader shouldn’t expect a critical, analytical biography either. It is what the subtitle promises: The Ultimate Illustrated History of a superb artist.

Dopefiend

2011-08-25T07:00:00.000-04:00

Nonfiction
Progress, not perfection

DOPEFIEND:
A Father's Journey from Addiction to Redemption
By Tim Elhajj
212 pp. Central Press Recovery

Reviewed by Ruth Douillette

Armed with two bits of advice from a former heroin addict--“Don't get high” and “Change your whole fucking life around”--Elhajj climbed the twelve steps to recovery. Not without falling down a rung or two, but this is a twelve-step success story, one that should encourage others that there is a way out of addiction for those who really want it.

“Progress, not perfection” is the mantra Tim Elhajj lives by. He'd be the first to admit he's not perfect and never will be. But as for progress, he's covered a lot of ground in the two-plus decades since he entered the recovery program that delivered him from alcohol and heroin addiction.

Or maybe he'd say it differently: it wasn't the recovery program, per se, that delivered him. It was his inner determination that made it work. Recovery programs are only as good as the desire of the addict to get clean, and relapses abound. But Elhajj had finally reached a point where he wanted to be clean more than he wanted the heroin he shot into his veins.

His young son Joey, a blessing from a broken marriage, was the prize he kept his eye on throughout the eighteen months he worked the steps in a New York program.

Elhajj doesn't spare himself. He points at his weaknesses, his failings, his foolish missteps. But we also see him battle to stay clean and grow steadily into his proud recovery of one day, then two, then a week, and now for longer than the years he was using.

Occasionally he finds himself wondering, “Do I really have to call myself an addict? I've been clean and sober for twenty years.” But when he looks into the eyes of his grown son, who fought his own demons with addictive substances, and the eyes of his two children from a new marriage, the only sane answer is “yes.”

Elhajj recognizes how dangerous the pit he climbed from is, and he is not going to saunter casually near the edge, so yes, he calls himself an addict. Still.

The book is a comfortable read, filled with Elhajj's sardonic humor. He spares readers the seamier side of addiction. We don't see the vomit, the filth, the desolate conditions an addict lives in. But we know he was there.

It is a story peopled with those who fought and won the addiction battle and work to help others get clean. It's a story about mended relationships. It's a story of hope, really--one that should bring encouragement to anyone who is still in the trenches fighting addiction, or those loving someone who is.

Mission to Berlin

2011-08-22T13:22:00.000-04:00

NONFICTION

Terror at 26,000 feet

MISSION TO BERLIN
The American Airmen Who Struck the Heart of Hitler’s Reich
By Robert F. Dorr
336 pp. Zenith Press

Reviewed by Gary Presley

The U.S. Army Air Corps lost nearly 23,000 aircraft in combat in World War II. More than 52,000 men died while on missions in those aircraft.

Losses at the beginning of the strategic bombing campaign were horrendous. The raids over Schweinfurt and Regensburg in August 1943 saw 315 bombers make it to their targets; 60 were lost. In October, there was another strike on Schweinfurt, and 222 of 296 B-17s dispatched made it to the target; 60 were lost. Each bomber carried a ten-man crew.

Author Robert Dorr covers one mission in that bloody air war over Europe. The Eighth Air Forces bombers took off on February 3rd, 1945, more than 1,000 of them, all dispatched to target the Nazi capital of Berlin, Germany. Dorr has undertaken extensive research, and he weaves the story from historical records and interviews with surviving airmen whose stories comprise the bulk of this fine history.

The air war over Europe, at least the strategic bombing, carries historical context that still sparks debate. Some revisionists believe it was relatively ineffective. Other doubters are especially disturbed by the British government targeting civilians. That policy sprang from the mind of Royal Air Force Marshal Arthur T. Harris, known as “Bomber Harris.” The commandant of the U.S. Army Air Corps, General Harold H. “Hap” Arnold, preferred to send his bombers to so-called strategic targets, installations like petroleum refineries and munition factories. The man in charge of strategic bombing in Europe, Lt. General Carl “Tooey” Spatz, agreed. One observer wrote, “Before 1945, Spatz tried whenever possible to avoid killing German civilians. Harris killed them deliberately and with equanimity.”

As noted, U.S. policy changed as the war wore on, the mission to Berlin being but one example, and the men whose stories are told in Mission seem to have accepted targeting city centers, most feeling it would shorten the war. The aiming point for this mission: a “building in the center of the city” of Berlin, with bombs being loosed from 26,000 feet.

Early in the war, 1942-43, the leaders of the air was crashed into Napoleon the Great’s famous dictum: “No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.” U.S. generals thought the British wasteful in pursuing night-time bombing, but early raids by the Americans proved one treasured Yankee thesis thoroughly wrong. Precision daylight bombing by heavily armed bombers was no easier and no more effective. No matter the number of machine guns on a bomber, the bombers still needed fighter plane escort. Bombing from higher altitudes to avoid flak revealed inadequacies in equipment. Heated flight suits and oxygen masks malfunctioned, for example. But the air crews flew on, even with odds of surviving those early 25 mission tours being only even at best. By the time of the 1945 Berlin mission, Nazi resistance in the air was fading, although flak barrages remained deadly. Late in the war, many gunners flew entire missions without seeing an enemy fighter.

Dorr follows specific air crew and specific bombers through the mission he is chronicling. The men have names and hometowns, and the bombers are named too: Purty Chili, Fancy Nancy, Blue Grass Girl. He takes the reader through wake-up in the early morning hours, breakfast, briefings, and out to the flight line. The author also swings over to the fighter squadrons that were to escort the thousand plane raid, a stream of bombers and fighters than extended to a length of more than ninety miles.

The stories of courage and sacrifice never seem to end. A bombardier is mortally wounded by a nearby flak burst, one arm almost severed, but he crawls back to his station and drops his bombs on target before succumbing to his wounds. A pilot of a P-51 Mustang escorting the bombers is shot out of the sky, but he makes a skilled emergency landing near a town, climbs out of the wreckage and waves to his wingman. He’s never heard from again, apparently killed by a mob of German civilians. A second lieutenant on his second bomber mission bails out after his B-24 is hit by flak, survives seven days so cold his feet freeze before he's captured by a German patrol. Next he is brutally beaten by a German officer and then imprisoned in a camp where 53 of 309 Americans die of starvation before liberation. The young pilot spends only two months as a POW, and his weight drops from 164 to 130 pounds.

Mission to Berlin encompasses seventeen chapters and four appendices, including notes, bibliography, and index. Dorr’s effort is also amply illustrated with historical photographs. The chapters cover the strike chronologically, beginning with Chapter One, “Wake Up” through Chapters Sixteen and Seventeen, “Wheels Down” and “Wrap Up.”

The end-of-book material is extraordinarily interesting. “The Bomber Stream” identifies groups, squadrons, and sometimes pilots, with special notes on aircraft shot down and casualty numbers. There is more fascinating material in “What Happened to Them,” which gives one paragraph biographies of some men featured in the text. Many stayed in the service and fought over Korea and Vietnam. One became an architect, another had a career with Firestone, and one became part of the prosecution team at Nuremberg.

Countless books have been devoted to the men and women of the “Greatest Generation,” but no one can say, understanding the critical period of history encompassed by the Great Depression and World War II, that one more book is unnecessary. This book deserves a place in the library of any reader who values history.

Dorr served in the post-war Air Force, had a 25-year career in the diplomatic service, and is “the author of seventy books and thousands of magazine articles and newspaper columns about the Air Force and air warfare.”

Robert F. Dorr has served history with Mission to Berlin.

Dancing in the Glory of Monsters

2011-08-19T10:02:00.014-04:00

Nonfiction
Human faces on the dead

DANCING IN THE GLORY OF MONSTERS:
The Collapse of the Congo
and the Great War of Africa
By Jason K. Stearns
400 pp. Public Affairs Press

Reviewed by Joe Short

The Great War of Africa, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, declares Jason Stearns in Dancing in the Glory of Monsters, ranks among the greatest cataclysms of our time. Some five million people have died in the conflict which raged from 1996 to 2003, and which even now continues, at lower intensity, in the eastern Kivu region.

The war has involved the armies of nine different countries, at least 20 rebel groups, and scores of armed ethnic and local groups clashing across Congo's vast expanse, a domain the size of Western Europe. Atrocities have abounded, including an estimated 300,000 or more rapes and the wanton destruction of the city of Kisangani which killed thousands.

“Despite its epic proportions,” laments Jason Stearns, the war in the Congo “has received little sustained attention from the rest of the world”--in the international press, much less than even the Darfur crisis in the Sudan.

In this tour de force of a book, Jason Stearns masterfully does his part to raise awareness of the Great War and to help us understand the incredibly complex reasons for it.

Since gaining political independence from Belgium in 1960, the Democratic Republic of the Congo still has not succeeded as a modern state capable of governing and developing itself. Joseph Mobutu, the Congolese army sergeant who became President Mobutu Sese Seko, made sure of that. According to Stearns, Mobutu's 38-year misrule was a primary catalyst of the Great War. He constantly brought on rebellions against his corrupt and autocratic rule--as by the rebel and his successor Laurent Kabila. In order to get and keep power, he emasculated rival power centers and the very institutions which might have assured national cohesion, economic development, and peace.

Mobutu, says the author, also had a large, direct role in precipitating the Rwandan-led attack on his country: “In his Machiavellian bid to become a regional power broker [in Africa and among neighboring countries], Mobutu had come to host over ten different foreign armed groups on his territory.” That angered immediate neighbors Rwanda, Uganda and Angola whose rebel opponents he provided sanctuary. They formed a coalition which invaded and toppled Mobutu in the “first” Congo war (1996 - 1997).

Dancing in the Glory of Monsters is particularly fascinating and insightful for its analysis and interviews concerning the pivotal ethnic conflict of the Great War: Tutsi vs. Hutu, and non-Tutsi tribes in the Congo. “The conflict in the Congo has many causes,” says Stearns, “but the most immediate ones came across the border from Rwanda.” And those, he explains, have been deeply rooted in the long-evolving tensions and conflicts between two main ethnic groups--“Hutu” and “Tutsi”--in Rwanda and Burundi, and the spillover of those rivalries into eastern Congo.

The Great War in the Congo was actually triggered by the civil war in Rwanda and by the genocide of 800,000 Tutsi and many Hutu at the hands of the majority Hutu people, militia and army (1994). When the Hutu government collapsed, a long-standing Tutsi rebel force, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), led by now President Paul Kagame, came to power in Kigali. Over a million Hutu then fled from the RPF across the border into the Congo (then called Zaire), along with the soldiers and militia who had led the massacres of the Tutsi in Rwanda.

Following from all this carnage, Kagame and the Rwandans led, instigated and/or variously supported invasions and other war measures in the Congo to eliminate the Hutu genocidaires and militias who wanted to return to power in Kigali.

According to Stearns,

The first invasion of the Congo in September 1996 had everything to do with security and geopolitical concerns [notably of Rwanda, Uganda and Angola] and only little to do with business…however, money soon became a decisive factor.

In one of the most revealing chapters of book, “Paying for the War,” he explains how Laurent Kabila (Congo) and Paul Kagame (Rwanda) each exploited the mineral riches of the Katanga and other border areas of eastern Congo to finance their war-making. Kabila, for example, without the resources or army to protect Kinshasa against the advancing forces of Rwanda, in the second war of the Congo (1998), struck partnerships with Zimbabwe and Angola to undertake massive timber, petroleum, banking, mining and agricultural projects.

Paul Kagame and the Rwandans, asserts Stearns, funded their military operations mainly by trading in Congo's gold, coltan (used for capacitors in cell phones and video game consoles), tin and diamonds. When the coltan prices soared in 2000--due a heightened international demand for cell phones and the Christmas release of a Sony PlayStation console--record profits were reaped for the Rwandan-instigated Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD), the Rwandan government, and their business associates.

Were these profits “just about sordid greed,” the author asks? In one of his main conclusions, Stearns acknowledges that individual Rwandan commanders did get rich--“it was difficult not to notice the influx of luxury SUVs and the construction of elegant houses in Kigali during the war.” Yet, he concludes, “for the most part, the profits facilitated the war.”

This is a glorious book with incredibly keen insights and synthesis of history and scores of personal stories. Deep and profound questions are addressed, with empathy and sympathy, but with neither sentimentality nor sensationalism. Why does Papy Kamanzi join a Rwandan death squad? What was it like for Beatrice Umutesi, a Rwandan refugee and social worker, to flee with other refugees on a thousand-mile trek through Congolese jungles? Why can't the “rebel professor,” Ernest Wamba dia Wamba, a Congolese leader “with pristine political and ethical credentials,” effect political change?

And then, as Jason Stearns asks: “How do you put a human face on a figure [five million dead in the Great War of Africa] when most of the casualties perish unsensationally, as a result of disease, far away from television cameras?” The answer: you write this extraordinary book.

The Clockwork Universe

2011-08-17T10:00:00.012-04:00

Nonfiction
Powdered pearls and pigeon dung

THE CLOCKWORK UNIVERSE:
Isaac Newton, the Royal Society,
and the Birth of the Modern World
By Edward Dolnick

320 pp. Harper Collins

Reviewed by David Hoekenga, M.D.

In the 1660s, “London was so disease-ridden that deaths outnumbered births; only the constant influx of newcomers disguised that melancholy fact,” according to author Edward Dolnick. Doctors were far more likely to hurt than to help their gasping patients because “medical knowledge was almost nonexistent.” When Charles II suffered a stroke in 1685, the best physicians in the land treated him by phlebotomizing three cups of his blood, giving him an enema, rubbing the royal feet with an ointment of pigeon dung and powdered pearls and searing the skull and feet with red-hot irons. Despite all these strenuous and other absurd exertions, Charles died four days later.

Life in London in those days was chaotic, filthy, and dangerous. Two killers in the seventeenth century--fire and plague--inspired more fear among inhabitants than any other, partly because they killed so quickly. The London fire of 1666 burned over two-thirds of the city and left one hundred thousand homeless. The plague epidemic of 1665, which killed healthy men overnight, claimed one fifth of the city's population.

Amidst the chaos, a small group of scientists struggled and experimented in an attempt to understand the universe. Edward Dolnick recounts the story of Newton, Hooke, Liebniz and Descartes. Dolnick's writing is clear and complete if not inspiring in describing these men and their investigations. The illustrations in most books seem like a careless afterthought. The pictures and diagrams in The Clockwork Universe are clear and add a new dimension to this story.

A large part of the book recounts the relationship of Newton and Liebniz. The author describes them as two bizarre people. Isaac Newton often slept in his clothes, had shoulder-length silver-gray hair, and was agoraphobic and celibate. He never traveled more than one hundred miles in a triangle formed by Cambridge, London, and Woolsthorpe (his birthplace). He never ventured as far as the English Channel. Dolnick writes of him, “The man who explained the tides never saw the sea.”

Gottfried Liebniz was small and jumpy and so nearsighted that his nose nearly scraped the page as he wrote. He wore a long dark wig. “Astonishingly brilliant, jaw-droppingly vain, charming, overbearing, a visionary one minute and a self-deluded dreamer the next; he was plainly a lot of work,” Dolnick reports. He wrote endlessly at high speed, “often while bumping along the road in a coach.” He inscribed over one hundred thousand manuscript pages that a team of editors plans to convert into more than sixty volumes of a thousand pages each. “More than three hundred years ago, for instance, Liebniz envisioned the digital computer. He had discovered the binary language of 0s and 1s now familiar to every computer programmer, and, more remarkably, he had imagined how this two-letter alphabet could be used to write instructions for an all-purpose reasoning machine.”

Newton was also a voluminous writer. He outlined his laws of motion and the law of gravity in Principia I, II, III, yet also wasted a half a million words on alchemy! Newton redesigned a telescope that was six feet long into one that was only six inches long but just as powerful, and sent it to the Royal Society. He also sent them a paper on the nature of white light, demonstrating that it was made up of all the colors. Dolnick remarks, “The paper (was) later hailed as one of the all-time landmarks in science.”

The bitter rivalry between Newton and Liebniz, especially over the discovery of calculus, was news to me. Dolnick describes it as follows: “The kind words (between Newton and Liebniz) were a sham. For years, both rivals had carefully praised one another on the record while slandering each other behind the scenes. Each man composed detailed, malicious attacks on the other and published them anonymously. Each whispered insults and accusations into the ears of colleague and then professed shock and dismay at hearing his own words parroted back.”

Since both of them discovered calculus, the most important question is who puzzled it out first. It seems that Newton discovered it in 1665, although he told no one about it; Liebniz found it in 1675 but didn't publish his findings until nine years later.

In The Clockwork Universe, Dolnick contrasts the squalor of daily life with the order of the universe, which is in fact an “intricate and perfectly regulated clockwork.”

Transition

2011-08-15T10:01:00.014-04:00

Nonfiction
Adding the human element

TRANSITION:
The Story of How I Became a Man
By Chaz Bono
eBook Format

Reviewed by Doris E. Pavlichek

One of the clearest memories I have from childhood is this: I felt like a boy.

- Chaz Bono

Whether you identify as straight or gay, male or female (or somewhere in-between), you will find something in this book with which you can identify. Who among us has not been through an awkward puberty or life transition? Chaz - the daughter turned son of Sonny & Cher - has been through at least four: chronological adolescence, coming out as lesbian, coming out as transgender FTM (female-to-male), and then enduring another puberty brought on by the testosterone used to change Chastity to Chaz. Like the story presented in his documentary Becoming Chaz, this book covers the hormone replacements, “top surgery,” and physical changes Chaz has undergone. As a middle-aged man, Chaz has finally found happiness and contentment with his own body that many of us simply take for granted; he has finally become the boy he always felt himself to be.

The story is presented in two parts. In Part One, “Victim of Circumstance,” Chaz gives us a look at what it meant to grow up as the child of one of America's most famous couples, America's version of royalty. As he points out, this often meant being “an afterthought, a person to play or spend time with after everything else [was] done” because the important people are the celebrities themselves. Little wonder that the young Chastity took great pains to be of no bother to her parents, always concerned with how her actions or even her feelings would affect them. This ingrained behavior later played a major role in the delay of Chaz's transition. Though he does not recall his childhood as bad, per se, he was repeatedly pushed to be more feminine and to stop dressing “like a slob.” It was at thirteen, after seeing the coming of age lesbian crush movie Personal Best, that Chastity began to see herself as lesbian. But as she points out now, she “confused [her] male gender identity with … sexual orientation.”

Part Two explores the unraveling of Chastity's life after the death of her partner Joan (a friend of her mother's). Chaz, the name he took when he became sober, felt a sense of unease and of not fitting in as a woman. The gradual realization that Chastity was actually Chaz, a male, inside was difficult. It took years of therapy, facing down a laundry list of fears, and dealing with terrible indecision before he decided to risk it all and come out as transgender. One of the biggest risks, besides hurting his family, was that he would alienate the gay and lesbian community, on which he depended for much of his support and for meaningful work. As part of the LGBT (lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender) community myself, I can tell you that not all of those initials in the acronym have equal standing. Typically, our community is made up of a healthy portion each of gay men and lesbians - and even drag queens - with bisexuals and transgender persons hanging far in the back. The same kinds of bias we encounter in the straight community is visited upon those people in our subculture. The understanding just is not there.

If you have read celebrity biographies, many of the details in this book will not surprise you. Chaz struggled with prescription drugs and alcohol, as well as with the pressures that are part of life in the public eye. Being the offspring of famous parents, he tried to avoid cashing in on their fame or using nepotism to find his place in the world. Additionally, like other children of politicians, he did not always agree with his father, a Republican and co-sponsor of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which defines - at the federal level - the act of marriage as being between one man and one woman. (At the time of Sonny Bono's tragic death, the two had not spoken “directly” in over a year.) Though it took some time, Chaz's family has accepted his life change, in part because they see how comfortable he is with his new life.

Why should you care about this book or Chaz's transition? As we understand more about gender identity from a medical and psychological standpoint, stories like Chaz's add the human element. Chaz has met transgender children through the group Transforming Family and sees how his life might have been different had he been able to express his true gender throughout his life. The courage shown by Chaz in telling his story is a brilliant opening to the dialogue we need to have and to the eventual acceptance of transgender people in our society.

Fabulous in Flats

2011-08-12T10:01:00.004-04:00

Nonfiction
Bright, trendy, and practical

FABULOUS IN FLATS
By Mary T. Wagner
154 pp. iUniverse

Reviewed by Ann Hite

The wonderful essays in this book line up in perfect order like shoes in one's closet: bright, trendy, and practical. I can't remember the last time I've laughed as hard as I laughed while reading Mary T. Wagner's wonderful memoir Fabulous in Flats. "The Sisterhood of the Chop Saw," the first essay, captures the essence of the whole book. One Saturday Mary gathers all those important men in her life, including her sons and her new man, and sets out to build a paved patio behind her house. In this delightful narrative, we find the truth of well-planned days. The chop saw is rented and work begins at 1:00 p.m. rather than early in the morning as planned. And to her surprise, she has been delegated the job of running the chop saw. Now for those, like me, who have never had the pleasure of using this power tool, it is a saw that cuts through bricks, among other things. It's very loud and aggressive, and Mary pulls it off with the flair of a seasoned handy--do I dare say--man.

Yes, the book does talk about shoes, an addiction for many:

In that fine and rebellious spirit, I'd like to strike a blow for a little variety in our shoe racks. Stilettos heels, I will admit, are feminine and gorgeous and empowering, but not quite suitable for every occasion. Snowshoeing for example. Doing housework… although June Cleaver gave it her all in “Leave it to Beaver.” I wouldn't recommend that you wear them on horseback. Or cleaning out the garage.

Flats on the other hand, may do fabulous duty in navigating cobblestoned streets in Europe and Philadelphia … but give little force to hammering a picture nail. And for heaven's sake, put on your lug-soled work boots before you pick up a chainsaw.

In the final analysis, you may have to buy a bigger shoe rack to embrace the diversity. But as I like to think and often write, there's always room in our hearts for more love, in our souls for more chocolate, and our closets for more shoes.

"Garage Archaeology" is a humorous piece about cleaning out one's garage and dispersing the variety of items accumulated in our lives. Each thing unearthed in the clutter tells a story and give us insight into the collector's dreams and efforts.

As I finished the last essay, "Full Circle," I understood the author had taken me on a journey with her as we explored her life tales. Fabulous in Flats is a perfect example of how self-publishing is changing. It is a creative, well-written, and success-driven. Ah, but just as you think you've relaxed into a light, comfortable, easygoing story, you come upon a passage like this:

One thing you can always count on in life is that if you're actually living it instead of just watching, there will always be more channel markers and more stumbling blocks and more growth rings along the way.

I highly recommend it as a beach read.

Quick Fall of Light

2011-08-10T10:00:00.006-04:00

FICTION
The dark forces of technology

QUICK FALL OF LIGHT
By Sherrida Woodley
298 pp. Gray Dog Press

Reviewed by Kathy Highcove

A small Cessna crashes in the Olympic rainforest. The pilot, Robert Russo, is dead. The renowned ornithologist had worked for Colzer-Bremen, a powerful pharmaceutical company which markets a vaccine called Pass-Flu. A pandemic has killed millions and is sweeping across the American continent. Pass-Flu lessens the pandemic's virulence but has not stopped it. The corporation maintains a tightly guarded bio medical research lab in the rain forest. Russo was on his way to this lab when the plane inexplicably went out of control and crashed.

Russo's young widow, Josie, must deal with her grief and many perplexing questions. He'd been increasingly uncomfortable in his work with Colzer-Bremen, but she's not sure why and is frustrated that she knows so little about his work. She decides to retrace his last trip to the Olympic forest lab, and bring along his personal laptop which contains Russo's private journal. Josie must decide: Delve into his secrets or leave them undisturbed?

She ferries over to the mainland and heads to the research lab. Josie leaves her car on a lumber road and hikes further into the forest - with the laptop. Confusion overwhelms her as she wanders among the giant pines in a chill drizzle. Her quest suddenly seems a big mistake and she impulsively places the laptop on a stump. She tries to leave but has no idea where to find the trail. An independent logger, Gary Sterns, comes upon lost miserable Josie. Stern chivalrously gives her his warm coat and starts to escort her to safety. He is further perplexed when she suddenly breaks away and goes back to the clearing, and retrieves a laptop from off a tree stump.

Stern soon realizes that Josie is the widow of the researcher he'd spied on from a perch in a lofty pine. He'd been curious about the highly guarded research lab in his own forest, so he climbed logger style up a nearby tall tree. He'd seen Russo care for a bird that looked exactly like pictures of the extinct passenger pigeon. A passenger pigeon in the Olympic rainforest? Stern is intrigued. Perhaps the researcher's widow will help him solve the puzzle. He takes her to his trailer to dry out and warm up, and the two compare notes. Stern decides to take Josie to his spy perch so she can see where her husband had done his research. After viewing the passenger pigeon and the lab, Josie has even more questions about Robert's work. Mystery makes the two new acquaintances uneasy partners.

With Stern's encouragement, Josie finally screws up her courage and the duo read entries on Russo's laptop. They learn that the Colzer-Bremen lab produces the Pass-Flu vaccine by working with pigeons. The researchers theorize that the passenger pigeon extinction was not totally due to over-hunting. They believe the birds succumbed to an avian flu that morphed into the horrendous Spanish flu of the early 1900s. Passenger pigeon descendents in the center are used by the researchers to develop Pass-Flu vaccine. A male pigeon, Gem-X, is the purest passenger pigeon specimen ever bred at the center and shows promise of producing a new line of the birds. And a purer vaccine. Russo thinks the corporation is overusing their birds with frequent inoculations and taking of blood samples. The ornithologist wants to protect Gem-X and the flock, which is starting to die from stress. Russo has written:

It's my job to protect the species. First and foremost, I'm not being listened to. If Colzer-Bremen decided to step up production of Pass-Flu, they will look first to inoculations, bringing them closer together. Any less than three months apart, the birds will die on the next update. There is no sparing. The middle ground is gone. No one is listening. …. Gem-X and I, however, have a plan.

And with those words, this adventure really amps up. Josie and Stern decide to cross through the traumatized Midwest, aflame with forest and grass fires brought on by global warming, and make their way to the Nebraska ranch of Curtis Hennings, another ornithologist of note, who began the pigeon research in 1980. They feel sure that Hennings can answer their questions about Russo's work, sudden death, and Colzer-Bremen's skullduggery. Robert Russo had taken his wife to meet Hennings on a long car trip before his death, as if to acquaint his wife with an ally - just in case. Unfortunately, as the two partners begin their pilgrimage East, Josie gets the flu. Stern is suddenly both the driver and Josie's nurse as they travel East, avoiding people, police and fires. (Sick people are forcibly quarantined.)

At the same time, Gem-X has flown the forest coop and seems to keep pace with their trailer as they travel east. Josie catches flashes of its bright feathers in the side view mirror. At first she thinks the bird is a vision brought on by flu fever, and then she realizes he's very real. Stern also thinks the bird is a product of her deliriums until he sees the bird for himself. The very same one he saw in the Olympic forest. And he also realizes that a hired gun is on their trail: Martin Pritchard, an employee of the drug company, follows them to capture the escaped bird, the possible source of a profitable cure. He's a dangerous enemy. The couple, the mercenary, and Gem-X travel through a United States that is fraught with human and environmental trauma.

This book is many layered and complex both in plot and social commentary. Robert Russo has made an unknowing Josie a key character in his plans to thwart the giant corporation who threatens the passenger pigeon flock in hopes of beating the biomedical competition for a vaccine. And so, Stern, Josie, Pritchard, and Gem-X move together toward Curtis Hennings' pigeon refuge in Nebraska. The action and tension heighten as the group near their goal. Human greed tries, once more, to wring profit from a captive species. Environmentalists once more struggle to foil the dark forces of technology. And, in the end, the title Quick Fall of Light makes perfect sense.

Tennessee Williams and Company

2011-08-08T10:01:00.017-04:00

Nonfiction

Push so hard, dare so much

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS AND COMPANY:
His Essential Screen Actors
By John DiLeo
204 pp. Hansen Publishing Group

Reviewed by Elizabeth McCullough

Quick - what's your favorite Tennessee Williams movie? There have been eighteen in all, films for which Williams wrote or contributed to the screenplay and/or was the author of the source material. Film critic John DiLeo covers twelve of the best in his newest book, Tennessee Williams and Company: His Essential Screen Actors.

Tennessee Williams and Company is organized around the idea of “an unofficial stock company” of actors who appeared in more than one Williams movie. This company, had it existed, would have been a prestigious one, comprised of movie stars like Marlon Brando, Elizabeth Taylor, Vivien Leigh, Paul Newman, and Richard Burton, as well as gifted character actors like Karl Malden and Mildred Dunnock. In all, the book covers the work of eleven actors who not only brought Williams' work to life, but were outstanding performers throughout their careers.

Each actor receives a full chapter that begins with a complete filmography and includes a capsule biography, a thorough exploration of their roles in Williams' film, and enough commentary on their other work to provide a useful context for the main subject of the book. Because it's organized by actor, you revisit each film at least once, seeing it through the lens of a different performer - for example, Streetcar is discussed three times, in the Marlon Brando, Vivien Leigh, and Karl Malden chapters. The films never grow stale with retelling, because DiLeo draws out each actor's unique contribution.

The book begins with Marlon Brando, the actor whose performance in A Streetcar Named Desire created “an ideal joining of actor and playwright, with both men sharing and displaying natural inclinations to push the boundaries of what was considered acceptable adult fare (conspicuously in sexual terms) in American drama. Brando and Williams helped make each other possible: Brando provided Williams with a presence of explosive and unapologetic male sexuality, while Williams gave Brando the perfect vehicle to unleash his blazing and unpredictable talent.” DiLeo begins here with a theme that will recur throughout the book: the power of the male sex object, “the use of a male as the object of lust” in Williams' films.

Whether writing about men or women, DiLeo is insightful, opinionated, and delightfully gossipy. Regarding Vivien Leigh's portrayal of Blanche DuBois in Streetcar, he writes: “Were the similarities between Leigh and Blanche (mental fragility, deteriorating beauty, rumors of sexual voracity) the reason why Leigh is so incredibly good in the film?” And in refreshing contrast to the Hollywood taboos of Williams' time, DiLeo is frank and funny about the sexual themes in Williams' work, pointing out every instance in which the studios, producers, and directors made nonsense of films like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or Suddenly, Last Summer with their timidity. About the latter film, he writes: “Hepburn glows especially when talking about Sebastian, who emerges as an aesthete, a poet who produced one work per year, each poem inspired by a summer vacation with Violet….There's no politically correct way to say this: Violet Venable is a fag hag.”

DiLeo takes all the films seriously, but he doesn't treat them, Williams, or the actors he writes about more reverently than they deserve. Writing about Elizabeth Taylor in Suddenly, Last Summer, he says, “Williams, assisted by [screenwriter Gore] Vidal, goes over the top. How do you account for a line as bad as this one, when Catherine describes the sun as 'a great white bone of a giant beast that had caught on fire in the sky.' Awful, yes; now imagine Taylor saying it, making it worse.”

Isn't that part of the fun of a Tennessee Williams movie, though, that crazy over-the-top quality that threatens to bring the whole thing down around the actors' feet? DiLeo shows impatience with the flaws in Williams' films, but in a way it's the flaws that make these movies worth watching over and over - it's the fact that they push so hard and dare so much, combined with our wish that they'd gone just a little farther and been a little truer, that keeps us coming back again and again.

Just as I will continue to revisit the films of Tennessee Williams, I will continue to dip into this book for deeper understanding of the performances that give them life. The recent death of Elizabeth Taylor reminds us that this generation of Hollywood greats is passing away; of the eleven actors profiled in this book, only Joanne Woodward and Madeleine Sherwood are still living. How lucky we are that they were captured on film for all time.

That Day in September

2011-08-05T10:00:00.007-04:00