Archives -- More book reviews and article from The Globe
Shelf Life
Kinder, gentler campaigns Katherine Adam analyzed the presidential race for her honors thesis at Boston College last year. Now it's been published as "The New Feminized Majority: How Democrats Can Change America With Women's Values" (Paradigm). Her co-author is BC sociologist Charles Derber. (Boston Globe, 5/4/08)
Rake in the florins, the Medici way!
I have decided to ignore our crashing economy, exploding debt, and the withering away of the dollar, fascinating though it all is, and have turned my attention to 15th-century Florence and the financial legerdemain of the Medicis. My guide has been Tim Parks's lucid and witty "Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics, and Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence" (Atlas, $13.95). I had been ... (Boston Globe, 5/4/08)
Language and conflict
Saree Makdisi, professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA, is the author of "Romantic Imperialism" and "William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s." His latest book, "Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation" (Norton, $24.95), is a lucid, invaluable chronicle of Palestinian daily life in the occupied territories. Makdisi, who alternates firsthand accounts with reports and interviews involving ... (Boston Globe, 5/4/08)
Bookings
TODAY: Jack O'Connell and Perrin Ireland read at 2 p.m., at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St., Newtonville. . . . Hillary Jordan reads from "Mudbound," at 4 p.m., at Porter Square Books, 25 White St., Cambridge. . . . . (Boston Globe, 5/4/08)
Fate accompli
The House on Fortune Street By Margot Livesey HarperCollins, 311 pp., $24.95 The late novelist Iris Murdoch said that literature was meant "to be grasped by enjoyment," a notion that certainly applies to the work of the wonderfully mutable Margot Livesey and her newest novel, "The House on Fortune Street." It is a story about sadness, about our desperate deceptions ... (Boston Globe, 5/4/08)
Dissatisfied with congress? Scientists try to help.
Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex By Mary Roach Norton, 319 pp., illustrated, $24.95 You want to love a book called "Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex," especially because its author is Mary Roach, who has already proven herself on the topic of death in bestsellers "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers" and "Spook: Science ... (Boston Globe, 5/4/08)
New & Recommended
The Plague of Doves By Louise Erdrich In her new novel, set in North Dakota, the award-winning author examines the long reach of the past (Harper, $25.95). A Summer of Hummingbirds By Christopher Benfey The hummingbird as muse for 19th-century artists is the subject of this deftly written sequence of intertwined vignettes (Penguin, $25.95). Terror and Consent: The Wars for ... (Boston Globe, 5/4/08)
History rechanneled
A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World By Tony Horwitz Holt, 445 pp., illustrated, $27.50 Near the end of "A Voyage Long and Strange," Tony Horwitz's latest mix of historical research and modern-day road trip, one of the people he spends time with says, "Myth is more important than history. History is arbitrary, a collection of facts. Myth ... (Boston Globe, 5/4/08)
Short Takes
Split By Suzanne Finnamore Dutton, 272 pp., $24.95 Having marched us through a sassy semifictional account of her pregnancy in "The Zygote Chronicles," in "Split" Suzanne Finnamore files a dispatch from the next, less cheerful stop on the grand tour of life: the implosion of her marriage to a husband whose philanderings had been sensed but never acknowledged, like a ... (Boston Globe, 5/4/08)
Sins of the father, tepidly told
A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father By Augusten Burroughs St. Martin's, 242 pp., $24.95 In his wonderful book of essays, "Burning Down the House," Charles Baxter laments the proliferation of "dysfunctional narratives," in which events take place but no one bears responsibility for them. Victim literature, Baxter calls it. Or, to quote Richard Nixon, "Mistakes were ... (Boston Globe, 5/4/08)
An early end; dating the undead
Before I Die By Jenny Downham Listening Library, unabridged fiction, six CDs, seven hours, $34, read by Charlotte Parry; also available as a download from audible.com, $23.95. (Boston Globe, 5/4/08)
Baseball as a fight for the Finnish
Sort of Gone: Poems By Sarah Freligh Turning Point, 88 pp., paperback, $17 Anatomy of Baseball Edited by Lee Gutkind and Andrew Blauner Southern Methodist University, 210 pp., $22.50 The 33-Year-Old Rookie: How I Finally Made It to the Big Leagues After Eleven Years in the Minors By Chris Coste Ballantine, 224 pp., illustrated, $25 The Best Sports Writing of ... (Boston Globe, 5/4/08)
At a distance
"All my life I've had to think about different ways of looking," V.S. Naipaul tells us at the start of yet another footsore stage (the 29th, including novels, essays, memoirs, and ruminations) in his lifelong trek to locate an estranged self in an estranging world. (Boston Globe, 4/27/08)
Bookings
TODAY: Senator Chuck Hagel discusses "America," at 3 p.m., at the Harvard Square Coop, Cambridge. . . . Young-adult author Marissa Doyle and children's author M. P. Barker speak at 3 p.m., at Concord Bookshop, 65 Main St., Concord. (Boston Globe, 4/27/08)
Balancing act
You could read Louise Erdrich's latest book for its wisdom. The author of 11 previous novels - including the award-winning "Love Medicine" - Erdrich writes from a philosophical, cultural, and historical perspective that is rich and deeply rewarding. Or you could read "The Plague of Doves" for its poetry. (Boston Globe, 4/27/08)
Terror and its reverberations
In "The Second Plane," a collection of newspaper and magazine pieces, Martin Amis remarks on the awkwardness of novelists - summoned by editors to do a stylish turn on the World Trade Center attack - as they try to locate a journalistic muscle inside themselves. ("Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?" Alexander Pope wondered. Here the butterfly was asked to turn one.) (Boston Globe, 4/27/08)
A house called Wit's End is only the beginning
Wit’s End By Karen Joy Fowler Putnam, 324 pp., $24.95 Delusion By Peter Abrahams Morrow, 297 pp., $24.95 (Boston Globe, 4/27/08)
New & Recommended
A Summer of Hummingbirds By Christopher Benfey The hummingbird as muse for 19th-century artists is the subject of this deftly written sequence of intertwined vignettes (Penguin, $25.95). (Boston Globe, 4/27/08)
Short Takes
This excellent history of madness in women - its definition, diagnosis, and treatment - begins with erotic descriptions of religious ecstasies and demonic possessions; proceeds through the introduction of asylums for the insane, the treatment of nerves and hysteria, the fashion for hypnosis, the glamour of psychoanalysis, the trends in eating disorders; and concludes with our present infatuation with the quick fix of psychopharmacology. (Boston Globe, 4/27/08)
Celluloid city
Boston has long had a bumpy ride with Hollywood. From time to time, the city's Puritanism, unions, and bureaucrats have thwarted directors who wanted to film here. Currently the city has a rosy relationship with filmmakers, but critic Paul Sherman has been around long enough to expect that the good times won't last. (Boston Globe, 4/27/08)
When intellectuals strode the earth (or at least New York)
Ah, the business of being an intellectual. You go around publishing books, giving lectures - always under the impression that ideas matter, that a democracy without a free-market debate of opinions would be less humane, and that the vigorous life of the mind is worth living. (Boston Globe, 4/27/08)
Historical Novels
Scottsboro By Ellen Feldman Norton, 384 pp., $24.95 Fall of Frost By Brian Hall Viking, 340 pp., $25.95 The Dark Lantern By Gerri Brightwell Crown, 321 pp., $24.95 At this time of year, it is natural to feel a little optimistic. Lumps of defeated snow have retreated to the deep woods, green shoots appear, and pale human limbs get their ... (Boston Globe, 4/20/08)
Bookings
TODAY: Melissa Stewart and Sarah Brannen speak at 3 p.m., at the Concord Bookshop, 65 Main St., Concord. . . . Jeffrey Brown signs "The Competitive Edge," from 1 to 2 p.m., at Barnes & Noble, Prudential Center. (Boston Globe, 4/20/08)
Case closed?
The Road to Dallas: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy By David Kaiser Harvard University, 509 pp., illustrated, $35 As a professional historian with about 40 years' experience, David Kaiser is proud of his ability to locate and interpret evidence. That experience is a major reason Harvard University Press decided to enter the John F. Kennedy assassination book merry-go-round, now ... (Boston Globe, 4/20/08)
Giving peace, trees a chance
Why War Is Never a Good Idea Written by Alice Walker, Illustrated by Stefano Vitale HarperCollins, 32 pp., ages 7 and up, $16.99 Planting the Trees of Kenya: The Story of Wangari Maathai By Claire A. Nivola Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 32 pp., ages 5-10, $16.95 How I Learned Geography By Uri Shulevitz Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 32 pp., ages ... (Boston Globe, 4/20/08)
The Celtic tiger and its carnage
I have discovered a brand-new way of bringing my blood to a boil. I can do it in one second flat by simply clicking on http://www.greystonesharbour.ie:80/ and looking at the "artist's impression" of the harbor project in Greystones, County Wicklow, Ireland. This modest little haven (and scene of my youth) is set to be transformed into a place of stunning, ... (Boston Globe, 4/20/08)
Intersecting lives, touched by an angel
The Third Angel By Alice Hoffman Shaye Areheart, 278 pp., $25 The success of any novel, E. M. Forster maintained, rests on the power of the writer to bounce the reader into accepting what he says. In "The Third Angel," as in many of her previous 24 novels, Alice Hoffman sets herself a difficult task. Its menagerie of characters includes ... (Boston Globe, 4/20/08)
Flights of fancy
A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade By Christopher Benfey Penguin, 287 pp., illustrated, $25.95 Strange as it may seem, during the decades spanning 1862 to 1882 especially, the hummingbird became a notable American icon, particularly among a tangled cluster of New England-based ... (Boston Globe, 4/20/08)
Banging the drum loudly
Red Sox Rule: Terry Francona and Boston's Rise to Dominance By Michael Holley HarperCollins, 207 pp.,illustrated, $25.95 (Boston Globe, 4/20/08)
Shelf Life
Green man Henry David Thoreau was a minor writer when he died. Today the man recognized as the nation's first environmentalist is a favorite of publishers, especially around Earth Day. (Boston Globe, 4/20/08)
New & Recommended
Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century By Philip Bobbitt A complex analysis of the war on terror from the author of "The Shield of Achilles" (Knopf, $35). Unaccustomed Earth By Jhumpa Lahiri In her latest story collection, the author mines the dislocations of the immigrant experience. (Knopf, $25). Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories By Tobias ... (Boston Globe, 4/20/08)
Short Takes
Dictation: A Quartet By Cynthia Ozick Houghton Mifflin, 179 pp., $24 Such delicious mischief. Set in and around the London of Henry James and Joseph Conrad, the title story in this collection stages an early skirmish in the class and gender wars that would roil the upcoming century. (Boston Globe, 4/20/08)
Present at the pandemic
Journalist and historian Misha Glenny reported on the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s for the BBC and is the author of "The Rebirth of History," "The Fall of Yugoslavia," and "The Balkans." His chilling new book, "McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld," charts the rise and proliferation of the new brand of organized crime, largely spawned by the ... (Boston Globe, 4/20/08)
And so it went
Armageddon in Retrospect: And Other New and Unpublished Writings on War and Peace By Kurt Vonnegut Putnam, 232 pp., illustrated, $24.95 "Writing was a spiritual exercise for my father, the only thing he really believed in. . . . His models were Jonah, Lincoln, Melville and Twain." So begins the moving and illuminating introduction to this posthumous collection of Kurt ... (Boston Globe, 4/13/08)
Short Takes
Twenty Chickens for a Saddle: The Story of an African Childhood By Robyn Scott Penguin, 464 pp., $24.95 "Living on the fringe" is how Robyn Scott's mother describes the family's unconventional approach to marriage, child-rearing, education, and housekeeping in Botswana. Mrs. Scott, an advocate of home-schooling, believed that work and play should be indistinguishable, that routine ruined creativity and television ... (Boston Globe, 4/13/08)
Star struck
Maria Mitchell and The Sexing of Science: An Astronomer Among the American Romantics By Renée Bergland Beacon, 300 pp., $29.95 Most Bostonians remember the tempest in 2005 when Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard University, suggested that the scarcity of women scientists might be due to their innate lack of aptitude for the subject. Reports, studies, and editorials poured forth ... (Boston Globe, 4/13/08)
Shelf Life
Prolific and popular poet Mary Oliver celebrates the creatures she observes on Cape Cod in "Red Bird" (Beacon), her 17th book of poetry. A longtime resident of Provincetown, Oliver, at 72, is among the nation's most popular poets. (Boston Globe, 4/13/08)
The holes in the war on terror
Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century By Philip Bobbitt Knopf, 672 pp., $35 Philip Bobbitt has been thinking broadly, deeply and innovatively about war for a long time. Six years ago, he published a massive book called "The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History." More than one reviewer called the book magisterial. Summarizing ... (Boston Globe, 4/13/08)
Bookings
TODAY: Poet Mary Jo Salter reads at 3 p.m. at the Concord Free Library, 129 Main St., Concord. . . . Phuli Cohan discusses "The Natural Hormone Makeover" at 2 p.m. at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St., Newtonville. (Boston Globe, 4/13/08)
New & Recommended
Unaccustomed Earth By Jhumpa Lahiri In her latest story collection, she mines the dislocations of the immigrant experience. (Knopf, $25). (Boston Globe, 4/13/08)
The chimp who tried to talk
Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human By Elizabeth Hess Bantam, 369 pp., illustrated, $23 The title and early pages of "Nim Chimpsky" suggest that it will be a biography of the chimpanzee who was the subject of a 1970s language study designed to show that chimpanzees are even more human than our 98.7 percent-shared DNA suggests. Ultimately, "Nim ... (Boston Globe, 4/13/08)
From beach house to restaurant to art studio
Wit's End By Karen Joy Fowler Putnam, 336 pp., $24.95 Turning Tables By Heather and Rose MacDowell Dial Press, 324 pp., $24 The Forgery of Venus By Michael Gruber Morrow, 336 pp., $24.95 April brings a delightful and eccentric new tale from a best-selling author, a scathingly funny first novel set in a high-end restaurant, and an unusual psychological thriller ... (Boston Globe, 4/13/08)
Reframed
For Herald American news photographer Stanley Forman, April 5, 1976, began as just another day. The news in Boston, as it had been for months, involved protests over court-ordered school desegregation. On assignment, Forman headed to City Hall Plaza, where high school students from South Boston were gathering for another demonstration. (Boston Globe, 4/6/08)
Out of place
"He had so little to do with India," a character named Kaushik muses near the end of "Going Ashore," the final story in Jhumpa Lahiri's new collection. "He had not gone back since the year his mother died, had never gone there for work. As a photographer, his origins were irrelevant. And yet, in Rome, in all of Europe, he was always regarded as an Indian first." (Boston Globe, 4/6/08)
Of elves and men
Dreamsongs, Vols. 1-3 By George R. R. Martin Random House Audio , unabridged selections, various prices, various readers, introductions read by the author; also available as varied downloads from www.audible.com. (Boston Globe, 4/6/08)
Not doing the right thing
The modern conservative movement in America began to emerge alongside the baby boomers in the early 1950s, with the publication of William Buckley's "God and Man at Yale," Whittaker Chambers's "Witness," Russell Kirk's "The Conservative Mind," and the founding of The National Review (again by Buckley). (Boston Globe, 4/6/08)
Baseball before steroids, arbitration, and charter jets
It is well known that baseball fans suffer from overbearing nostalgia, a condition that grows more aggressive with age, which is to say as the world deteriorates from that state of sun-dappled perfection that marked our youth. Gone, we lament, are the days when World Series games were played on crisp fall afternoons, not in the middle of an arctic ... (Boston Globe, 4/6/08)
Short takes
Children are the original magic realists. The effects that novelists of a postmodern bent must strive for come naturally to the young, a truth given inventive realization in this wonderful quasi-mystery tale by Jeffrey Ford. (Boston Globe, 4/6/08)
Bookings
TODAY: Ann Harleman and Ed Hardy speak at 2 p.m., at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St., Newtonville. . . . Sarah Brannen and Melissa Stewart discuss "Uncle Bobby's Wedding" and "When Rain Falls," at 4 p.m., at Porter Square Books, 25 White St., Cambridge. (Boston Globe, 4/6/08)
Catching Frost's cadence
Brian Hall's 2003 novel, "I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company," re-imagined not only the Lewis and Clark expedition but also the inner lives of its participants, Anglo and Native American. "Fall of Frost" (Viking, $25.95) penetrates even deeper, this time into the life of Robert Frost, which unfolds as a graceful, mesmerizing switchback from the poet's 1962 visit ... (Boston Globe, 4/6/08)
The top 5 baseball books in New England
1. "Red Sox Rule: Terry Francona and Boston's Rise to Dominance," by Michael Holley (HarperCollins, hardcover) (Boston Globe, 4/6/08)
Shelf life
Light housekeeping For 14 years, nature photographer Thomas Mark Szelog and his wife, Lee Ann Szelog, lived next to the Marshall Point lighthouse in Port Clyde, Maine. They watched porpoises and harbor seals, witnessed baptisms and weddings at the water's edge, took care of the lighthouse, and produced a book. (Boston Globe, 4/6/08)
The rifts and rhythms of a vanished Southie
It's 1974, and the sometimes volatile busing of black students into South Boston (and white students out of South Boston) is in full throttle. In a state of barely contained terror, Ann Ahern, a white 16-year-old from Southie, is riding the afternoon black bus with a black classmate, Rochelle, out of Southie and through Roxbury. (Boston Globe, 4/6/08)
Movers and sheikhs
The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century By Steve Coll Penguin, 671 pp., illustrated, $35 One of the many conspiracy theories surrounding Sept. 11, 2001, is some inchoate suspicion about the request the Saudi embassy in Washington, D.C., made to fly out Saudi citizens and members of the Bin Laden family in the days after the attack. ... (Boston Globe, 3/30/08)
Compleat angler
A dozen years ago, Charlie Moore was a failed businessman. Today he's known as the Mad Fisherman to the 1.5 million viewers a week who watch "Charlie Moore Outdoors" on NESN and "Beat Charlie Moore" on ESPN2. (Boston Globe, 3/30/08)
Portrait of Stegner, slightly skewed
Wallace Stegner and the American West By Philip L. Fradkin Knopf, 369 pp., illustrated, $27.50 Though he was born in Iowa in 1909 and raised primarily in Saskatchewan and Salt Lake City, though he lived for long periods in the Midwest and Northeast and was buried in Vermont in 1993, Wallace Stegner is strongly identified with the West. (Boston Globe, 3/30/08)
Free fall
Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories By Tobias Wolff Knopf, 379 pp., $26.95 In choosing 21 stories from his three collections along with 10 published since, Tobias Wolff tells us that he felt free to improve them. It is unusual among writers and artists, who generally hold to the notion of the finished work. It's not unknown, though; Henry ... (Boston Globe, 3/30/08)
How down have we dumbed?
The Age of American Unreason By Susan Jacoby Pantheon, 356 pp., $26 Recently added to the list of impending dooms - global warming, a retro-1930s economy, seven more months of sleeping children in campaign ads - come stern warnings from The New Yorker and The New Republic on the death of the printed word. Be it newspapers, magazines, or an ... (Boston Globe, 3/30/08)
Bookings
TODAY: The annual PEN Hemingway Awards take place at 3 p.m., at the JFK Library, Columbia Point, with keynote speaker Alice Hoffman; for registration information, call 617-514-1643. . . . Elisa Albert and Eric Lerner read at 2 p.m., at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St., Newtonville. . . . Harry Groome reads from "Wing Walking," at 3 p.m., at Concord ... (Boston Globe, 3/30/08)
Short Takes
A Long Retreat: In Search of a Religious Life By Andrew Krivak Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 324 pp., $25 It is impossible not to like Andrew Krivak. He is honest and earnest, even-tempered and open-hearted. In measured tone and voice, he chronicles his eight years of restless searching. After growing up in a large Catholic family in Pennsylvania mining country, ... (Boston Globe, 3/30/08)
New & Recommended
The Rain Before It Falls By Jonathan Coe In a tense and affecting work, Coe presents a dying woman's account of her tangled life (Knopf, $23.95). A Golden Age By Tahmima Anam Set during the violent birth of Bangladesh, this assured debut novel intimately explores political and religious conflicts (Harper, $24.95). Lush Life By Richard Price A wry portrait of ... (Boston Globe, 3/30/08)
Sifting through a surfeit of clues
Friend of the Devil By Peter Robinson Morrow, 384 pp., $24.95 An Incomplete Revenge By Jacqueline Winspear Holt, 306 pp., $24 Judas Horse By April Smith Knopf, 318 pp., $23.95 "She might have been staring out to sea." Yorkshire-born Peter Robinson's "Friend of the Devil" begins with the haunting image of a woman in a wheelchair, sitting perched at the ... (Boston Globe, 3/30/08)
A. J. Liebling goes to war
A. J. Liebling is best known for writing about the doings of New York's demimonde, the vaudevillians, burlesquers, small-time operators, sports impresarios, athletes, bookies, and sharps, its curious customers in all their hues. He is especially renowned for writing on boxers and on the pleasures of the table. But when France and Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939, ... (Boston Globe, 3/23/08)
Short Takes
The Have-Nots By Katharina Hacker Translated from German by Helen Atkins Europa, 352 pp., paperback, $14.95 The title characters, the have-nots of this unsettling novel, are not its protagonists but rather features of the human landscape in which its more advantaged central characters act out their amorphous crises. (Boston Globe, 3/23/08)
Wheels within wheels
The Rain Before It Falls By Jonathan Coe Knopf, 240 pp., $23.95 In Jonathan Coe's "The Closed Circle" (2004) a character asks, ambitiously, "Does narrative serve any function?" His short new novel offers one answer: It serves the function of being necessary to human life. Coe himself might shrink from such an encompassing explanation. At one moment in "The Rain ... (Boston Globe, 3/23/08)
Weaving the waves of talk radio
Burning Up the Air Jerry Williams, Talk Radio, and the Life in Between By Steve Elman and Alan Tolz Commonwealth Editions, 366 pp., illustrated, $27.95 Golden Wings & Hairy Toes: Encounters With New England's Most Imperiled Wildlife By Todd McLeish University Press of New England, 242 pp., illustrated, $26 Pilgrims: New World Settlers and the Call of Home By Susan ... (Boston Globe, 3/23/08)
Faith examined
God in the White House: A History - How Faith Shaped the Presidency from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush By Randall Balmer HarperOne, 243 pp., $24.95 The Faithful Departed: The Collapse of Boston's Catholic Church By Philip F. Lawler Encounter Books, 272 pp., $25.95 How Jesus Became Christian By Barrie A. Wilson St. Martin's, 304 pp., $24.95 What ... (Boston Globe, 3/23/08)
Bending the birth of the blues
In Search of the Blues By Marybeth Hamilton Basic, 309 pp., illustrated, $24.95 Alongside a railroad track in the Mississippi Delta, two signs commemorate the birth of the blues in the town of Tutwiler. While touring the Delta in 1903, a wooden panel indicates, W. C. Handy heard a musician sing as he pressed a knife along the strings of ... (Boston Globe, 3/23/08)
Satisfying tidbits, about food and family
Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink Edited by David Remnick Books on Tape, unabridged nonfiction, 20 CDs, 25 hours, various readers, $96 from booksontape.com, 1-800-733-3000; also available as a download from audible.com; $45.50 unabridged, $20.97 abridged (Boston Globe, 3/23/08)
The sanctuary of the night
Morag Joss began writing crime fiction following a playful conversation with author P.D. James. Three "Sara Selkirk" mysteries followed, but it was Joss's superb novel of psychological suspense, "Half Broken Things," that prompted comparisons to both James and Ruth Rendell. "The Night Following" is a further departure, into the mind of a woman unmoored by marital betrayal and that of ... (Boston Globe, 3/23/08)
Bookings
MONDAY: Poet Linda Pastan reads from "Queen of a Rainy Country" and novelist Rachel Pastan from "Lady of the Snakes" at 8 p.m. at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, 56 Brattle St., Cambridge; $3. . . . Samantha Power discusses "Chasing the Flame" at 5:30 p.m. at the Kennedy Library, Dorchester. . . . Joshua Kendall discusses "The Man ... (Boston Globe, 3/23/08)
In 'Johnny One-Eye,' reading to experience history
Johnny One-Eye By Jerome Charyn Norton, 480 pp., $25.95 Gore Vidal once said that any reader who gets his history from historical fiction gets the history he deserves. But smart readers don't read historical fiction for history. They read it for the experience of history. They read it to live the past through the struggles of characters who are thrust ... (Boston Globe, 3/23/08)
New & Recommended
Lush Life By Richard Price A wry portrait, in novel form, of the tension between New York's low-lifes and hipsters (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26). Mr. Adams's Last Crusade By Joseph Wheelan John Quincy Adams's 17 post-presidential years in Congress, entertainingly examined (PublicAffairs, $26.95). A Golden Age By Tahmima Anam Set during the violent birth of Bangladesh, this assured debut ... (Boston Globe, 3/23/08)
Shelf Life
Baseball matters With Opening Day around the corner, publishers are throwing their first pitches for Boston, among them Richard Bradley's "The Greatest Game: The Yankees, the Red Sox, and the Playoff of '78" (Free Press), and Michael Holley's "Red Sox Rule: Terry Francona and Boston's Rise to Dominance" (Harper). Coming next week is "Dynasty: The Inside Story of How the ... (Boston Globe, 3/23/08)
Beyond Words
America at Home: A Close-up Look at How We Live By Rick Smolan and Jennifer Erwitt Running Press Book Publishers, 240 pp., $40 The outcome of a national project involving everyone from professional photographers to people with camera phones, "America at Home" is an upbeat collection of portraits looking at how and where people spend their time when they're with ... (Boston Globe, 3/23/08)
Eye on the prizes
A widely lauded, darkly funny novel about a Chicago ad agency during the dot-com bust has won the 2008 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for debut fiction. Patrick Hemingway, son of Ernest, will present the award to Joshua Ferris for "Then We Came to the End" (Little, Brown), at 3 p.m. March 30 at the John F. Kennedy ... (Boston Globe, 3/16/08)
Pulp factions
It was a mild revelation to me, when I had kids, that we would feed them a steady diet of "children's literature," and that with the exception of Daniel Pinkwater's collected works these predigested texts would be so insipid. (Boston Globe, 3/16/08)
Germany's ambivalent ally
October of 1940, Adolf Hitler and Generalissimo Francisco Franco met at Hendaye, near the French-Spanish border. The purpose was to flesh out Spain's agreement in principle to enter the war on the side of Germany and Italy. The principle was reaffirmed, and it went on being reaffirmed over the next couple of years. The flesh, for the most part, never did attach. (Boston Globe, 3/16/08)
All creatures, great and overrated
Twenty years ago my high school biology teacher drew a leafless tree of life on the blackboard. At the base of its trunk were single-celled protists, and as the tree extended upward, it forked into the plant and animal kingdoms. The limbs of each kingdom quickly subdivided into phyla: ferns and flatworms, conifers and echinoderms. Toward the top of the tree, a branch was labeled "chordates," and at the very top of that branch's mess of twigs, our teacher labeled the highest shoot "human beings." (Boston Globe, 3/16/08)
Short Takes
Last Last Chance By Fiona Maazel Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 337 pp., $25 "Being a drug addict is the hardest job I have ever had," whines Lucy, the 29-year-old narrator of this very smart and very funny novel. When not whining, Lucy boasts, wisecracks, and pokes, prods, and sneers at herself and all those around her - mostly her drug-addicted ... (Boston Globe, 3/16/08)
Hustle and merlot
Luxury lofts have replaced flophouses. Haute cuisine has supplanted the soup kitchens. Post-Giuliani, Manhattan's once-edgy Lower East Side seems like a Wi-Fi wonderland, a kind of theme park where, as writer Richard Price has observed, young would-be artists flit between coffee shops, pretending to live in a never-ending production of "Rent." (Boston Globe, 3/16/08)
New & Recommended
Mr. Adams's Last Crusade By Joseph Wheelan John Quincy Adams's 17 post-presidential years in Congress, entertainingly examined (PublicAffairs, $26.95). A Golden Age By Tahmima Anam Set during the violent birth of Bangladesh, this assured debut novel intimately explores political and religious conflicts (Harper, $24.95). (Boston Globe, 3/16/08)
Bookings
TODAY: Stephanie Schorow discusses "The Crime of the Century," at 2 p.m., at Duxbury Public Library, 77 Alden St., Duxbury. . . . Sara Laschever discusses "Ask for It," at 3 p.m., at the Concord Bookshop, 65 Main St., Concord. . . . Darci Klein discusses "To Full Term," at 2 p.m., at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St., Newtonville. (Boston Globe, 3/16/08)
Dealing with life in a dying world
Lydia Millet's sixth novel, "How the Dead Dream," is a quirky, discursive portrait of one man's evolving consciousness about success, love, kinship, and planetary responsibility. In this provocative odyssey, as in her previous novels, Millet mingles the rational, absurd, and supernatural. (Boston Globe, 3/16/08)
Forced through celebrity's many circles of hell
Three Girls and Their Brother By Theresa Rebeck Shaye Areheart, 352 pp., $23.95 Remember Me? By Sophie Kinsella Dial, 400 pp., $25 (Boston Globe, 3/9/08)
Creative colony
The hills of northwestern Connecticut have long been dotted with the studios and homes of writers and artists. Philip Roth, Frank McCourt, and Honor Moore live in Litchfield County, as did Harriet Beecher Stowe, Madeleine L'Engle, James Thurber, Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Miller, and others. Photographs by Miller's late wife Inge Morath - on permanent exhibit at the University of Connecticut ... (Boston Globe, 3/9/08)
Bookings
TODAY: Harvard creative-writing professor Bret Johnston presents an interactive event at 2 p.m., at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St., Newtonville. . . . . William Cullina discusses "Native Ferns, Moss and Grasses," at 1 p.m., at Garden in the Woods, 180 Hemenway Rd., Framingham. (Boston Globe, 3/9/08)
Jim dandy
The Blue Star By Tony Earley Little, Brown, 286 pp., $23.99 When he published his first novel, "Jim the Boy," about a year in the life of 10-year-old Jim Glass in fictional Aliceville, N.C., Tony Earley told The New York Times that one day he wanted "to see this really fat book that has five or six short stories and ... (Boston Globe, 3/9/08)
Innocent but inept, an emigré arouses suspicion
A Person of Interest By Susan Choi Viking, 356 pp., $24.95 At the start of "A Person of Interest," a package bomb mortally injures Professor Hendley, chairman of the computer department and star of an otherwise mediocre Midwestern university. "Oh, good" is the immediate thought of Professor Lee in the adjoining office, even as the blast knocks him off his ... (Boston Globe, 3/9/08)
New & Recommended
A Golden Age By Tahmima Anam Set during the violent birth of Bangladesh, this assured debut novel intimately explores political, cultural, and religious conflicts (Harper, $24.95). (Boston Globe, 3/9/08)
Voices carry, and a writer listens
Jonathan Coe's dazzling 1995 novel, "The Winshaw Legacy," brilliantly satirized Margaret Thatcher's England and introduced American readers to one of Britain's most perceptive, versatile, and graceful writers. It was followed by "The Rotters' Club" and "The Closed Circle" (completing the political trilogy) and "The House of Sleep." Now in "The Rain Before It Falls" (Knopf, $23.95), Coe tells the story ... (Boston Globe, 3/9/08)
Means and ends
Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization By Nicholson Baker Simon & Schuster, 566 pp., $30 On Dec. 7, 1940, the Air Ministry of Great Britain sent a secret memo to Prime Minister Winston Churchill. One hundred planes, the ministry maintained, could deliver "the most destructive possible bombing attack against a selected German town." After ... (Boston Globe, 3/9/08)
It took a village to win a Newbery
Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! : Voices From a Medieval Village By Laura Amy Schlitz Illustrated by Robert Byrd Candlewick, 84 pp., ages 10 and up, $19.99 (Boston Globe, 3/9/08)
Short Takes
Beet By Roger Rosenblatt Ecco, 225 pp., $23.95 The hills and valleys of New England are full of dead ringers for Beet College, the locus in quo of this jokey farce by author and TV commentator Roger Rosenblatt. (Boston Globe, 3/9/08)
Bonus Myles
The once-unimaginable has happened: Flann O'Brien (d. 1966) has found a place in the Everyman's Library - and the event has opened the door to my writing about this incomparable Irish writer again. The snug, cloth-bound, ribbon-embellished volume ($25) contains all four novels written under the pen name Flann O'Brien. It also includes Patrick C. Power's translation of "An Béal ... (Boston Globe, 3/9/08)
An erratic path through the storm
Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World By Samantha Power Penguin , 622 pp., illustrated, $32.95 (Boston Globe, 3/9/08)
Revved up, knocked out, fed up
One Helluva Ride: How NASCAR Swept the Nation By Liz Clarke Villard, 293 pp., illustrated, $25 Irish Thunder: The Hard Life and Times of Micky Ward By Bob Halloran Lyons, 289 pp., $24.95 Won't Back Down: Teams, Dreams, and Family By Kim Mulkey with Peter May Da Capo, 219 pp., illustrated, $24.95 God Save the Fan: How Preening Sportscasters, Athletes ... (Boston Globe, 3/2/08)
Been there, played that
Upbeat: Nine Lives of a Musical Cat By David Amram Paradigm, 321 pp., illustrated, $25.95 David Amram identifies himself as "a full-time composer who is also an improviser, a conductor, a free-association scat singer," but that hardly covers the range of his work. Amram seems to have done everything there is to do in the world of music. He has ... (Boston Globe, 3/2/08)
Turkish delight
Scholar Jenny White, an anthropology professor at Boston University, brings Turkey's past to life in a new book she characterizes as a "Muslim version of 'The Da Vinci Code.' " (Boston Globe, 3/2/08)
Bookings
TODAY: Jim Leahy reads from "Living in Concord," at 3 p.m., at Concord Bookshop, 65 Main St., Concord. (Boston Globe, 3/2/08)
A widow and mother, present at a painful creation
A Golden Age By Tahmima Anam Harper, 276 pp., $24.95 The map featured in Tahmima Anam's "A Golden Age" reveals the curious geography that once defined Pakistan. This volatile nation was created when India was partitioned in 1947, with West Pakistan on one side of India, and East Pakistan, hundreds of miles away, bordering the area around Calcutta. Rehana, the ... (Boston Globe, 3/2/08)
Trunk show
Jumbo: The Greatest Elephant in the World By Paul Chambers Steerforth, 224 pp., illustrated, $23.95 Anyone associated with Tufts University is well aware of the tale. The humble contents of an old Peter Pan Crunchy Peanut Butter jar that sits in the office of the university's athletic director represents the remains of one of the 19th century's biggest international celebrities. (Boston Globe, 3/2/08)
Short Takes
Redeemed: A Spiritual Misfit Stumbles Toward God, Marginal Sanity, and the Peace That Passes All Understanding By Heather King Viking, 238 pp., $24.95 This memoir deserves to be as popular as Elizabeth Gilbert's best-selling "Eat, Pray, Love," although it is not quite as much fun. It is more demanding, but also more rewarding. Its trajectory is more straightforward (from sinner ... (Boston Globe, 3/2/08)
The flip side of Frost
The Collected Prose of Robert Frost Edited by Mark Richardson Belknap/Harvard University, 378 pp., $39.95 A year ago "The Notebooks of Robert Frost" appeared, the first of a number of works by Frost to be published by Harvard University's Belknap Press. Now, following on its heels, comes this welcome edition of Frost's prose, 76 items ranging from a paragraph to ... (Boston Globe, 3/2/08)
Bookings
TODAY: Lester Brown discusses "Plan B 3.0," at 7:30 p.m., in Cary Hall, 1605 Mass. Ave., Lexington. (Boston Globe, 2/24/08)
Shelf Life
Spree and sympathy The petty criminals who robbed the Brink's garage in Boston's North End nearly 60 years ago are among the city's favorite folk heroes. (Boston Globe, 2/24/08)
A return to Oz, marred by a wicked killing
Moonlight Downs , By Adrian Hyland, Soho, 322 pp., $24 Of Blood and Sorrow , By Valerie Wilson Wesley, Ballantine, 222 pp., $25 Unknown Means , By Elizabeth Becka, Hyperion , 324 pp., $22.95 (Boston Globe, 2/24/08)
A soldier who picked up his pen
Arkady Babchenko was drafted into the Russian Army in 1995 to fight in the First Chechen War. He was 18. During training, in accordance with tradition, he and his fellow recruits were beaten and tortured by their superiors. Some died. At the front, Babchenko witnessed unimaginable brutality and occasional acts of courage, even humanity. In 1999, he volunteered to fight ... (Boston Globe, 2/24/08)
Surf wars
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations By Clay Shirky Penguin, 336 pp., $25.95 Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob By Lee Siegel Spiegel & Grau, 182 pp., $22.95 In the spring of 2006, a computer programmer named Evan Guttman performed a small miracle. He helped a friend retrieve an expensive cellphone ... (Boston Globe, 2/24/08)
New & recommended
Tyrants By Marshall N. Klimasewiski In this impressive story collection, a variety of characters are artfully revealed (Norton, paperback, $14.95). His Illegal Self By Peter Carey Three alluring characters form the center of this novel of exile and identity (Knopf, $24.95). The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead By David Shields Essays about humanity that are ... (Boston Globe, 2/24/08)
Inside the "controlled madness" of creation
Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories By Steven Millhauser Knopf, 244 pp., $24 "Dangerous Laughter" is Steven Millhauser's best story collection. This baker's dozen sums up everything he has been driving at since the beginning of his writing career. Adolescents sulk, break down, and die. Other characters - artists and ordinary people alike - disappear except for the barest trace, or create ... (Boston Globe, 2/24/08)
Ingenuity the mother of 'Invention'
The Invention of Hugo Cabret By Brian Selznick Scholastic, 544 pp., ages 9-12, $22.99 Henry's Freedom Box: A True Story From the Underground Railroad Written by Ellen Levine Illustrated by Kadir Nelson Scholastic, 40 pp., ages 6-9, $16.99 First the Egg By Laura Vaccaro Seeger Roaring Brook, 32 pp., ages 2-6, $14.95 You can count on the librarians. Year after ... (Boston Globe, 2/24/08)
Mr. Adams stays in Washington
Mr. Adams's Last Crusade: John Quincy Adams's Extraordinary Post-Presidential Life in Congress By Joseph Wheelan PublicAffairs, 309 pp., illustrated, $26.95 Though many former US presidents have retired from the public eye, not all have been content with quiet pursuits. Thomas Jefferson, among his other accomplishments, founded a university in his home state of Virginia. William Howard Taft, defeated in the ... (Boston Globe, 2/24/08)
Vicious cycle
Major: A Black Athlete, a White Era, and the Fight to Be the World's Fastest Human Being, By Todd Balf, Crown, 306 pp., illustrated, $24 Nearly a century before Michael Jordan, there was another African-American athlete whose powerful jump dominated a sport and captivated fans worldwide. Only this spectacular superstar did it while remaining very much earthbound. (Boston Globe, 2/24/08)
Short takes
Kyra By Carol Gilligan Random House, 241 pp., $25 Kyra and Andreas, both European exiles, traumatized survivors of man's inhumanity to man, have washed ashore in 1980s Cambridge, where they meet and, after Andreas batters down Kyra's considerable emotional defenses, become lovers. Then, abruptly, Andreas leaves, and Kyra falls apart. Since the novel's author is Carol Gilligan, the renowned theorist ... (Boston Globe, 2/24/08)
Soul deep
Certain great art establishes only gradually the kind of wide, deep appeal known as "classic." Such art may be perceived at first as merely popular, like the work of William Shakespeare and Duke Ellington, and eventually acquire critical esteem. Other works may at first appear peculiar and arcane, like those of Vincent van Gogh or Emily Dickinson, and then for later generations come to seem universally, immediately appealing. (Boston Globe, 2/17/08)
Easy rider
To the honorifics William Vollmann has gathered during his meteoric career, we may now add one more: creator of an entirely new genre. His new book, "Riding Toward Everywhere," is the first recorded example of Transcendental Hoboism. There's no other way to describe this brief and fevered paean to the joys of American nomadism, by way of Emerson, Thoreau, and the Southern Pacific Railroad. (Boston Globe, 2/17/08)
Immortality can really get old
Unworshiped, aging, their powers shrinking, the Greek gods have been living poor for the past few centuries in a shabby London neighborhood. Artemis, goddess of the moon, the tides, and the hunt, works as a dog walker. Aphrodite gives phone sex; Apollo stars in a third-rate TV program; Ares, the war god, foments terrorism and small far-off conflicts. Ceres is a gardener, Athena dispenses wisdom in a high academic jargon nobody can understand, and Zeus, quite mad, is locked up in the attic. (Boston Globe, 2/17/08)
Domesticated partners
Everything Amy Sutherland needed to know about improving her marriage she learned at a school for animal trainers. That's the gist of what she wrote in a 2006 "Modern Love" column in The New York Times . It stirred debate - and became the most e-mailed Times article of the year. (Boston Globe, 2/17/08)
Short Takes
Most of the stories in this beautiful collection center on two groups of characters: a family (Brian and his parents, Henry and Angela) and a couple (Tanner and Jun Hee). We meet Henry and Angela first, in "The Third House," during their courtship. (Boston Globe, 2/17/08)
In genteel Vienna, it's coffee with crime
Here's a little test. The next time the conversation turns to books, say "I'm reading a very good historical novel" and observe the response. An indulgent smile? ("What a dimwit.") An impatient frown? ("Excuse me, we're discussing books here.") Despite the fact that the genre has recently been graced by the likes of Martin Amis, a quaint prejudice persists. Yet "serious" novelists who stoop to historical fiction often disappoint, while a writer such as Frank Tallis shows how irrelevant these distinctions are. (Boston Globe, 2/17/08)
Bookings
TODAY: Paul and Stephen Kendrick read from "Douglass and Lincoln," at 3 p.m., at the Concord Bookshop, 65 Main St., Concord. (Boston Globe, 2/17/08)
New & Recommended
His Illegal Self By Peter Carey Three alluring characters form the center of this novel of exile and identity (Knopf, $24.95). (Boston Globe, 2/17/08)
The anatomy of Yeats's inventions
In her preface to "Our Secret Discipline," Helen Vendler tells us that 50 years ago, as a graduate student at Harvard, she planned to write her dissertation on Yeats's poetry; then on reflection decided that, at age 22, she didn't know enough to write about a poet who kept going until age 73 (she wrote on Yeats's plays instead). (Boston Globe, 2/17/08)