Editors' Picks for December: Nonfiction
by Staff, PW Daily for Booksellers -- Publishers Weekly, 12/7/2004
Each month Publishers Weekly editors pick the books they feel are exceptional. Today we present the editors' picks of nonfiction for December:
Orphans: Essays by Charles D'Ambrosio. Clear Cut Press (www.clearcutpress.com), $12.95 paper (240p) ISBN 0-9723234-5-7
In this excellent collection of essays culled mainly from the Seattle weekly the Stranger, D'Ambrosio (The Point and Other Stories) brings to the real world the same idiosyncratic personal language and keen, melancholic intelligence of his fiction. The pieces range widely on the public-private continuum, from an intimate meditation on his brother's suicide (published, in a slightly different form, in the New Yorker) to a commentary on the dispute between environmentalists and Native American whale hunters in the Pacific Northwest; somewhere in between lies the title essay, a first-hand reportage about an orphanage clinging to a fragile sense of community in the Kafkaesque chaos of post-Communist Russia. These disparate subjects are united by the author's persistent themes of the fakery of mass-produced images of reality and the rigidity of public rhetoric and ideology. At a media stakeout of a barricaded gunman, D'Ambrosio observes a TV reporter "rush in front of the camera and morph into the face of a slightly panicked and alarmed person nevertheless manfully maintaining heroic control while reporting nearby horrors." An essay on Mary Kay Letourneau probes the inadequacy of the vocabularies of crime and psychotherapy in describing her affair with a 13-year-old boy. A piece on a lurid haunted house named Hell House, in which gruesome dramas are staged and the characters in them are sent to hell for every transgression, notes that "it wasn't sin so much as sadness and despair and heartbreak and misfortune and cluelessness and just every stupid human possibility that was answered with damnation." D'Ambrosio's perceptive insistence on the primacy of the individual's voice and viewpoint sounds a resolutely humanistic tone.
Lidia's Family Table by Lidia Matticchio Bastianich. Knopf, $35 (432p) ISBN 1-4000-4035-3
Fans will appreciate this latest companion book to Bastianich's latest PBS series of the same name (after Lidia's Italian-American Kitchen), and it may win her some new admirers as well. It presents the food Bastianich prepares at home for her large family (which includes children, grandchildren, siblings and her 80-plus-year-old mother and her companion, who live upstairs), but it's also proof that home cooking need not be oversimplified, with plenty of projects for those who relish a challenge. There are also many photographic illustrations offering gentle guidance to readers attempting Grilled Tuna Rollatini under Tomato-Lemon Marinade, or Pasticciata Bolognese. Elegant recipes, such as Fresh Pear and Pecorino Ravioli, are sprinkled throughout, but the majority are for hearty dishes that lend themselves to serving family-style, like Zucchini and Country Bread Lasagna with day-old bread in place of pasta and Braised Beef Shoulder Roast with Venetian Spice, which incorporates cinnamon and coffee beans. As testament to both Bastianich's creativity and the endless supply of good food from Italy, there are authentic, unusual treasures here, like Riso Sartù, which packs risotto into molds for individual towers. Bastianich is also generous with clever tips and brainstorms: Why not use poached garlic purée for those with delicate digestion, or poach corn on the cob in tomato sauce? The range is impressive, the flavors strong. It's enough to make readers clamor to be adopted into the Bastianich clan.
Undue Influence: How the Wall Street Elite Put the Financial System at Risk by Charles R. Geisst. Wiley, $34.95 (320p) ISBN: 0-471-65663-1
The Glass-Steagall Act, separating commercial banks from investment banks, was passed in 1933 to prevent banks from risking depositors' funds on the still-shaky stock market. It was repealed in 1999, when gambling other people's money on the stock market was considered the height of financial probity. In this engaging history of Glass-Steagall, Geisst (Wall Street: A History) surveys the 70 years leading to this ideological sea change, as the widespread Depression-era populist suspicion of Wall Street subsides and is replaced with the pro-business dogma of the Reagan era and the New Economy bubble. Formal repeal, Geisst shows, was preceded by decades during which big commercial banks, hungry for a slice of the lucrative investment banking business, increasingly flouted Glass-Steagall restrictions with the connivance of ideologically sympathetic Federal Reserve regulators. The vast sums banks spent on lobbying and campaign contributions and the cushy Wall Street jobs awaiting government officials who switch sides make Geisst wonder whether "the gamekeepers and the poachers had all joined the same club." Geisst provides a lucid guide to the financial issues involved and a colorful account of decades-long political debates and legislative wrangling, while raising troubling questions about the direction of public policy.
The Queen's Slave Trader: John Hawkyns, Elizabeth I, and the Trafficking in Human Souls by Nick Hazlewood. Morrow, $26.95 (432p) ISBN 0-06-621089-5
This impressively researched and disturbing biography tells the story of John Hawkyns, an Elizabethan privateer who conducted profitable slave trading expeditions, capturing his victims on the west coast of Africa and selling them illegally in Spanish ports in the Americas. British journalist Hazlewood (Savage: The Life and Times of Jenny Button) traces Hawkyns's move from "roughneck" Plymouth to London, his formation of a trading syndicate and his successful if brutal slave trading voyages of 1562-1563, from which he returned to England with a show of riches. Having won the patronage of Elizabeth I, Hawkyns departed on an another eventful voyage. Here Hazlewood is able to draw on a wide array of archival resources, both Spanish and English, as he recounts Hawkyns's exploits in Sierra Leone and South America. Hazlewood furnishes yet more scintillating detail in his account of Hawkyn's next, fateful 1567 voyage, focusing on various members of the crew, many pressed into service as young boys. After savagely capturing yet more African slaves, Hawkyns suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of a Spanish squadron in Veracruz. Lacking drinking water and supplies for the journey home, he abandoned a number of his men in Mexico; their pathetic fates in the hands of the enemy are painstakingly traced. Brilliantly evocative of 16th-century Anglo-Spanish rivalry and the brutality of Elizabethan maritime life, Hazlewood's book is a tour de force that condemns rather than romanticizes its thuggish adventurer.
The Most Beautiful Gardens in the World by Alain le Toquin, text by Jacques Bosser, introduction by Michel Baridon. Abrams, $60 (272p) ISBN 0810955849
Gorgeous photographs by French luminary le Toquin render this impressive coffee-table tome one of the most awe-inspiring garden books in years, and lively text by Bosser only heightens its appeal. The book's scope is grand--encompassing such exotic locales as Morocco, Singapore and New Zealand--but perhaps the most breathtaking photographs are of the unexpected garden havens in Iran. "The Persian garden was not designed for strolling. The prince was carried in his sedan chair to an open pavilion or to the edge of a pool to mediate, hear music, write verse or listen to recitations," Bosser writes when describing the ancient water garden of Bagh-e Fin. Fold-out sections provide panoramic views of such escapes as the jewel-toned gardens of Yves Saint Laurent's labyrinthine Marrakech oasis and a kitchen garden in Loire Valley, France, in which vibrant green, leafy cabbages take on the beauty of blossoms. Le Toquin displays his love of the more playful side of garden architecture in a stop at the Nymphaeum of Villa Visconti Borromeo Litta outside Milan, a stone pavilion built over a spring and decorated heavily with (what else?) stone nymphs, and makes the unusual choice of capturing the gardens of Versailles in winter; snow blankets the nude statuary and offers a unique view of the gardens' "bones." With its sumptuous full-color photographs, this visual tour is a necessary indulgence for armchair gardeners. A detailed section providing the location and contact information for nearly all the public gardens featured also makes it a handy reference for readers whose ambitions--and resources--equal le Toquin's own.
