Pearl's Picks for May 2008
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Pearl's Picks for May 2008 |
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Learn more about Nancy Pearl.
H.W. Brands' The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream is
history the way it ought to be written: expansive, thorough, wide-ranging, and filled with
interesting people and events (in some cases so interesting that it's hard to believe that
the people were real and that the events really did occur; but this isn't a "memoir," it's
a history--they were and they did). The California Gold Rush did many things in addition
to making a lot of people very rich--it probably also hastened the coming of the Civil War
by pushing forward California's dreams of statehood. But perhaps Brands' most interesting
contention is that it also changed the way Americans thought, and still think, about success.
Before the Gold Rush, our vision of success was that it came after a lifetime of hard work
and diligent application--but the Gold Rush rewarded luck, pure and simple. You didn't
succeed simply because of your hard work, or because you were a good person or did good
works, but because you happened to be in the right place at the right time. (In a sense,
it was a real debunking of, or at least rebuttal to, the Protestant ethic of our nation's
Founding Fathers.) This is a good choice for any American history buff, especially those
most interested in 19th-century Americana.
From the Botticelli-like young woman portrayed on the cover to its intriguing
plot line, Dia Calhoun's Aria of the Sea is a winner from first page
to last. Teen girls especially will appreciate and empathize with Cerinthe,
the main character, who wants desperately to be a dancer (the dream her mother
had for her), but whose real talents lie in another direction entirely. Although
Aria of the Sea is a fantasy--the story is set in an imaginary world--readers
will find Cerinthe's story, from her mother's death and her consequent decision
to ignore her talents as a healer and try to follow her mother's dream to be a
dancer, entirely realistic. (Her experiences at the school of dance she attends
are not unlike those of the young actors and dancers in the movie Fame.)
Calhoun's creation of a full and vivid character in Cerinthe--her strengths,
how she comes to understand herself and her gifts, how she deals with her
closest dance competitor (and all around not-so-nice girl), Eliana--adds
depth and resonance to this coming-of-age tale.
When Felix (Fix) Castor is hired to exorcise a ghost at the Bonnington Archive,
a private library devoted to maritime history, he doesn't realize that he will
have to cope with a dazzlingly beautiful succubus who simply exudes sex appeal,
werewolves and other shape changers, and plain old vanilla-flavored human evil.
Whew! That's quite an array of enemies determined to keep Fix away from the
archives and from finding out what's behind the haunting. The Devil You
Know, Mike Carey's first novel--he's been a comic book writer up until
now--moves along at a good clip and has many nice touches that give it an
unexpected (but not unwelcome) depth, including descriptions of Fix's
relationship with his brother, a priest who believes that exorcism is best
left to the Church, and his relationship with an old friend, whose incarceration
in a mental hospital he accidentally caused. From the very first scene at a child's
birthday party--Fix has been brought in to entertain the spoiled little brats--you
know you're in for a treat. And there's plenty of plot room for sequels galore.
(For those who shy away from horror fiction, trust me, this is really a good
example of horror-lite, a brand new sub-genre I just invented.)
English professor Kate Fansler solves her first case (and it's a doozy!)
in Amanda Cross's In the Last Analysis. When one of her students,
Janet Harrison, asks Kate to suggest a psychiatrist, Kate highly recommends
her old friend, analyst Emanuel Bauer. Then Janet turns up dead in Emanuel's
office, and he becomes the main suspect in her murder. Totally believing in
her old friend's innocence, and feeling that in some way she was responsible
for Janet's death, Kate decides to solve the crime on her own, making good
use of unofficial assistance from a good-looking assistant district attorney
as well as from her niece's fiancé, whom she hires to do some sleuthing.
Although Kate went on to solve many more crimes in many more books, this highly
satisfying puzzler remains, in my view at least, the best. (Amanda Cross was the
pseudonym that the late writer--and English professor--Carolyn Heilbrun used
for this series of witty and literate whodunits.)
The subject matter of Ann Gibbons' book, The First Human, is revealed by
its subtitle: 'The Race to Discover Our Earliest Ancestors.' What the subtitle
doesn't give readers a taste of is just how entertaining and informative a tale
the author has to tell, all about the events and individuals (in some cases,
"characters" would be a more apt descriptor) involved in the quest to discover
the oldest hominids and answer the question of when humans split off from apes.
Aimed at the reader who has an interest in, but not necessarily any significant
knowledge of, the subject, science writer Gibbons (who began this book as an article
for Nature magazine) offers enough of a basic introduction to the fields
of paleontology, paleo-anthropology, and even geology, to get us going. And what a
story it is: she begins with the early disagreements over whether mankind originated
in Asia or Africa (Africa won out); introduces us to some of the early paleontologists,
including Louis Leakey and his family; covers the major discoveries, such as Donald
Johannson's Lucy (who was featured prominently in popular science magazines as "the
mother of mankind"), and Toumai, uncovered in a dig in Chad; explains the many
disagreements and controversies that arise in a field when you're talking about
events that took place many millions of years ago; explores the personalities of the
various major players; and much more. Here's her take on why the field of paleontology
is so contentious:
In Apples & Oranges: Going Bananas with Pairs, readers young and old will get
a kick out of the loopy and mind-stretching comparisons Sara Pinto makes between objects.
How are a bird and a kite alike? The obvious answer is that they both fly in the sky.
But Pinto also lets us know, in both words and pictures, that neither one of them uses
the telephone. How are trousers and underpants alike? Well yes, they're both articles
of clothing, but, as Pinto demonstrates, neither one makes a good hat. The illustrations
are brightly colored, eye-catching, and infectiously humorous. I'm looking forward to
sharing this book with my five and three-year-old granddaughters, and having us all
play a game of making up our own unlikely but perfectly reasonable comparisons. Hmm.
How are a computer and a television alike? Neither eats waffles for breakfast…
In Jean Thompson's Throw Like a Girl: Stories, we meet a collection of women,
young and not-so-young, and observe them as they attempt to navigate their way through
their respective lives: the men they love (and those they lose, or leave), their shaky
family relationships, their difficult choices, and the seemingly innocuous ones--taken
ever so lightly--that will have unforeseen repercussions in the future. In the title
story, Janey looks back over her relationship with a good friend who's dying of cancer;
in "Lost," which begins, "I was twenty years old and about as pretty as I was ever going
to be, although I didn't know that yet," the speaker's life was shaped, for better or
worse, by a chance meeting with a black-haired motorcyclist; in my favorite story, "The
Woman Taken in Adultery," an unnamed narrator tells of her affair with a man she simply
calls The Paramour. That story's first line is "I had two daughters and a husband who
didn't notice anything." Thompson's writing--as I suspect you can tell even from these
few examples--is smart, wry, often self-mocking, and impossible to resist.
There are some books that make you realize just how lovely the book as an object can be.
Nature's Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick, by Jenny Uglow, is one of them.
Printed on heavy, creamy paper adorned with small, intricate woodcuts, this is clearly
a book to treasure; the care taken in its production is apparent. How fortunate, then,
that the excellence of the contents matches the quality of its packaging. Although I
very much enjoy biographies, I had never even heard of Uglow's subject, Thomas Bewick,
and would probably never have even picked up her book, save that I was one of the
judges for a national contest in which it was a finalist. (I'm thrilled to say that
it won.) Uglow writes elegantly, in simple and unadorned prose that perfectly illuminates
a time, a place, and her subject. Thomas Bewick (1753-1828) grew up and lived all his life
in Northumberland, England. As was then the fashion, as a young teenager he was apprenticed,
in his case to an engraver, and began a long and successful career of depicting scenes of
nature in the medium of wood engravings. (The book includes many, many beautifully
reproduced examples of Bewick's meticulous work, each one worthy of looking at long
and carefully--one could weave whole tales around each engraving. This slows down the
reading of the book significantly!) Woven in with Bewick's biography is the larger story
of what was happening in England during his lifetime, most notably the beginnings of the
Industrial Revolution (which would reach its zenith after Bewick's death, in the late
19th and early 20th centuries), and the competing energies of the Romantic movement,
which was characterized by intellectual and artistic hostility toward that revolution.
(Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is a prominent example of Romanticism's take on the dangers
of the new industrialization.)
Jess Walter's Citizen Vince, set in the final days leading up to the
presidential election of 1980 (Jimmy Carter vs. Ronald Reagan), is the story
of Vince Camden, currently hiding from his past in Spokane, Washington, and
working as a doughnut maker--courtesy of the federal government's witness
protection program. His past, or at least that part of it relevant to Walter's
story, consisted mainly of low-grade criminal activity--Vince is the kind of
guy our mothers warned us against. The novel takes off when that past catches
up with him, in the form of a hitman sent by none other than the youngish (but
already extremely powerful) mob boss John Gotti, who didn't take kindly to his
cooperation with the Feds. Trying his best to evade death sends Vince back to
New Jersey, involves him in a heart-pounding poker game, and forces him to put
his relationship with his girlfriend Beth (a prostitute with a heart of gold)
on hold. But this is also the story of a man's one last try for redemption
(even if it does involve merely doughnuts--"Fry, frost and fill," Vince muses
at one point. "No reason such a sequence should be any less satisfying than
some other sequence--say, scalpel, suction and suture,") framed against a
presidential election that turned on the hostage crisis in Iran and Ronald
Reagan's inspired question: "Are you better off today than you were four
years ago?" Part crime novel, part character study, it all adds up to a
terrifically entertaining book--and one that's particularly appropriate
for this run-up to the national election this coming November.
Remember Robert Redford in the film Out of Africa? Meryl Streep did her
usual superb job of inhabiting the character of Isak Dinesen, but when I finished
Sara Wheeler's engrossing and fluent Too Close to the Sun: The Audacious Life
and Times of Denys Finch Hatton, I realized what a terrific choice the
casting director made when Robert Redford was cast as the great love of Dinesen's
life (although, as we read here, his great love was East Africa, particularly Kenya).
Wheeler moves Finch Hatton (1881-1937) into the spotlight, illuminating this complex
(not to mention handsome, non-conforming, dashing, charismatic, and daring) man,
from his childhood in a once-wealthy family, his happiness at Eton, and his
fascination with the wide open spaces of East Africa, where he spent both his
happiest and most bitter days. For World War I history buffs, there's a lot of
very interesting material here on warfare in East Africa, in which Finch Hatton
was a combatant. Wheeler writes: "It wasn't the troglodyte world of the trenches,
but it was another kind of hell. The war in East Africa--virtually unknown to the
outside world--was, in its safari through purgatory, a negative metaphor for the
Kenyan paradise of the epoch handed down in literature and myth. And the
campaign remains buried under the weight of history, whereas Karen Blixen's
luminously famous first line--'I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the
Ngong Hills'--has irreversibly enshrined the lyrical romance of the same
landscape." Although Finch Hatton left no diaries, indeed, little sign of
an inner, contemplative life at all, Wheeler does an admirable job of giving
us a strong sense of a man of whom it can seemingly be said that to meet him
was to love him. If you have any doubts, just read Out of Africa and Beryl
Markham's West with the Night and you'll see. Book clubs looking for a
"mini-series" of books might consider reading Wheeler, Markham, and Dinesen over
a three-month period.
Long May She Reign is the fourth novel in Ellen Emerson White's series
about Meg Powers, daughter of the first female President of the United States,
and it's a definite page-turner. You don't need to have read any of the three
earlier books to thoroughly enjoy this one (although now that the publisher,
Feiwel and Friends, is reissuing The President's Daughter, White House Autumn,
and Long Live the Queen, anyone who missed out on reading them will have
a chance to catch up). Following her kidnapping and torture (events chillingly
described in the third book), Meg Powers realizes that her life will never be
the same. Not only is she forced to delay going off for her freshman year of
college as she tries to recover, both mentally and physically, from her
ordeal--and it's more than just the frequent nightmares and the painful physical
therapy that she has to endure--she must come to terms with the knowledge that
her mother announced publicly, again and again, that despite her daughter's
life being in danger, she "can not, have not, and will not negotiate with
terrorists." (And indeed, the President didn't do those things. If Meg had
not smashed the bones in her own hand in a successful escape attempt, she
probably would have been killed.) Meg is a completely believable teenager:
she's prickly, courageous, loving, difficult, and often funny. Although the
larger plot--the kidnapping, Meg's special situation as the President's
daughter, the post-traumatic stress she's enduring in this book--are vastly
different from the experiences of most teens, the smaller, but no less important,
issues--dealing with college roommates, family relationships, and decisions about
sex and boyfriends--will ring true to readers of all ages.
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