Season's readings
Books and authors are always in the news, grabbing attention by telling stories, trumpeting trends, or offering enthusiastic advice. Sorting through this crowd can be like shopping on the day before Christmas: a madhouse where the items that get the most attention tend to be those that are most heavily marketed. Some books deserve the hype. But lots of good reads never get their well-earned praise. So once again this year, the Globe editorial page offers a necessarily quirky list of new books that caught our eye and fulfilled their promise to inform and delight. Happy holiday reading.
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"I do not believe in making a public spectacle," Richard Nixon told the Chinese premier Chou En-lai during the trip that opened China to the United States, and the rest of the world, in 1972. But of course President Nixon thrived on publicity, and this diplomatic and public relations triumph was worthy of the hype orchestrated by his aide H.R. Haldeman. Margaret MacMillan recounts the journey vividly in "Nixon and Mao: The Week that Changed the World" (Random House). "I voted for you during your election," Mao Tse-tung said facetiously at their historic meeting. "I like rightists."
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A happily married, professionally satisfied father of two gets snookered by his counter-culture sister into driving her guru from New Jersey to North Dakota. While the brother tries to give the Siberian-born guru "a sense of America," the spiritual master ever so gradually introduces his driver to "another dimension of the interior life." Roland Merullo's "Breakfast with Buddha" (Algonquin Books) is an engagingly told road story with stops for bowling, a Nepalese meal in Wisconsin, and miniature golf. Under the deft direction of the guru, the brother's self-discovery turns out to be fairly painless, aside from a yoga session. For the reader, there's no pain at all.
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Is it ever possible to "uplift" women through prostitution? This is the question Karen Abbott flirts with but never really answers in "Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America's Soul" (Random House). The elegant sisters who ran the Everleigh Club, an exclusive bordello in Chicago's first ward, schooled their "butterflies" in Balzac and Baudelaire, but that made little difference to the anti-vice crusaders determined to put a stop to what they called the "white slavery" institution. The book is a rollicking social history of booze, corruption, and scandal in turn of the century America, part E.L. Doctorow and part A.C. Kinsey.
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"The Abstinence Teacher" (St. Martin's Press) is the kind of novel reviewers often say is "ripped right out of today's headlines," only it's funnier and more forgiving. A 40-something divorcee is the sex education teacher at a competitive public high school until her leafy town is invaded by fundamentalist Christians, who force her to prescribe a reductionist "just say no." Meanwhile the born-again minister and soccer coach (suburbia's religion if ever there was one) is fighting his own demons. Author Tom Perrotta, who grew up in New Jersey and lives in Belmont, knows a lot about suburbia, and the social fear, ambition, and greed that motivates its denizens.
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Imagine Queen Elizabeth discovers the pleasures of reading at an advanced age. What a delight for her as she moves from Ivy Compton-Burnett and Nancy Mitford to Proust and Dostoyevsky. What an ordeal for the royal lackeys as she slights her duties to sink deeper into memoirs of Lauren Bacall. What a befuddlement for her subjects as she tries to engage them in literary conversation. And what fun it must have been for Alan Bennett to write this novella "The Uncommon Reader" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
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With the popularity of recent books by atheists taking a sledgehammer to all aspects of religious faith, Mark Lilla's "The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West" (Alfred A. Knopf) is a refreshingly nuanced change of pace. Rather than simply asserting the rightness of secularism, it examines how Western concepts of God's place in society evolved over time, spurred by the writings of men like Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Not for those merely seeking ammunition against the other side, it is a thorough and accessible look at a story whose ending is far from certain.
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Ian McEwan's novels hinge upon misunderstandings that result in consequences both unpleasant and unforeseen. "On Chesil Beach" (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday) follows this same trajectory. Charting a couple's first night as man and wife, McEwan reveals the history of their courtship as the plot builds toward consummation. Both virgins, Edward finds himself experiencing first-time jitters, while Florence is repulsed by thoughts of sexual intimacy. Will she reveal this to Edward? Will he finally tire of the disgust he perceives as frigidity? The course of the marriage will depend upon how the two approach - or don't - the expected sexual encounter.
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Boston fans might be forgiven after another World Series win for thinking that baseball's most interesting players all call Fenway home. A wholesome corrective for that myopia is Tim Kurkjian's "Is This a Great Game, or What?: From A-Rod's Heart to Zim's Head - My 25 Years in Baseball" (St. Martin's Press). Kurkjian, ESPN's longtime hardball commentator, spins delectable stories about the game's skilled but often off-the-charts goofy practitioners. If you take your time with the book, it will take you right up to pitchers' and catchers' reporting day in February.
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The world of pure mathematics is hardly the most obvious terrain for a novel. In "The Indian Clerk" (Bloomsbury USA), David Leavitt vividly dramatizes the true story of G.H. Hardy, a British academic who discovers a self-taught mathematician in Madras. This young genius's story, alas, ends in tragedy. The book is set just before and during World War I, a period of great ferment. The themes Leavitt explores are as fresh as ever: anxieties about war, the collision of politics and personal ambition, the travails of an immigrant trying to get by far from home.
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There are certain dark phases in history that everyone ought to know about. When two of the most popular Soviet writers of their era, Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman, compiled first-person accounts of the Nazi murders of more than 2 million Jews on Soviet territory, they were preserving a passage of history that governments on both sides of the Iron Curtain would later try to forget or distort. In introductory essays to "The Unknown Black Book: The Holocaust in the German-occupied Soviet Territories" (Indiana University Press), editors Joshua Rubenstein and Ilya Altman illuminate the mournful background to these preserved narratives of the ultimate injustice.
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Readers who are exhausted by long years of news about war and torture being served up with breakfast will find company in Marvin Bell's collection of poetry, "Mars Being Red" (Copper Canyon Press). The book is a lament and nearly a coping manual. In the poem "The Campus in Wartime," Bell writes: "Three thousand of ours and thousands of theirs / are too many body bags to bury in the mind, / so while the gas of rotting bodies seeps up / from the ramshackle coffins and folded flags, / the young seek books or booze to soften the ache."
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Sometimes what is closest may also be rarest. So it is with the urban wilderness whose rich history and endangered status author David Kales describes in "The Boston Harbor Islands: A History of an Urban Wilderness" (History Press). The story of these islands opens outward in different directions: toward a distant geological past, toward more recent episodes of New England history, and toward the current struggle to preserve this unique national park from industrial predators.
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One was an adulterer, another a cuckold, a third too young, and the fourth a dreadful orator, but these Tory members of Parliament formed the nucleus of the group that summoned the courage to oppose Neville Chamberlain's appeasement policy in the 1930s. Their stories are vividly told by Lynne Olson in "Troublesome Young Men: The Rebels Who Brought Churchill to Power and Helped Save England" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Winston Churchill, preoccupied by his writing and weakened by his support for Edward VIII, stays in the background.
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A secretary tells the doctor, "There's an invisible man in the waiting room." The doctor replies, "Tell him I can't see him." Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein use this joke to illustrate Immanuel Kant's theory of knowledge in "Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy through Jokes" (Abrams Image). A giddy gloss on major threads of philosophical thinking from the ancients to the new age, the book caroms from ribald stories to bad puns to transcendent gags in search of insight and illumination. Wise guys do wise men, wonderfully. 