Forecasts from April 18 Issue: Nonfiction, Continued

-- Publishers Weekly, 4/18/2005

Click here for April 18th Nonfiction reviews, part one

The history of Tudor England is rife with claimants to the throne. Gristwood tells one of the more heartrending of these stories: that of Arbella Stuart, the young cousin of the future James I, who appears at times to have been bred by her grandmothers for the precise purpose of challenging the throne. Raised mostly by her maternal grandmother, Bess Hardwick (wife of Mary Stuart's jailer), Arbella grew up isolated and virtually imprisoned by Bess, with an inflated sense of her status and destiny. As a young woman, she attempted to gain her freedom with schemes that were treated as dangerous intrusions into dynastic policy. Her rambling letters from this period suggest that desperation had driven her mad. By the time of Queen Elizabeth's death, Arbella's royal hopes were dashed, but the new king, James, invited her to court. While she gained some independence then, she was still enough of a political hot potato that the king would not sanction her marriage. Frustrated, Arbella eventually arranged her own marriage and ended up, as a result, in the Tower, where she apparently starved herself to death a few years later. Despite the intriguing story, Gristwood occasionally engages in excessive foreshadowing and inconclusive speculation when facts are thin. But she fully supports the contention that contemporaries took very seriously this now obscure young woman's pretensions to the throne. (June)

IF YOU LIVED HERE, I'D KNOW YOUR NAME: News from Small-Town Alaska
Heather Lende. Algonquin, $23.95 (296p) ISBN 1-56512-316-6

Lende chronicles the various lives and deaths of the people of Haines, Alaska, an almost inaccessible hamlet 90 miles north of Juneau. In writing her social and obituary columns for Haines's Chilkat Valley News—some of which are included here—she blends reportage and humor. Lende has lived in Haines all her adult life and is well-known in town. She deftly illuminates local color: the sewer plant manager who rides a motorcycle and sports a ZZ Top beard, the high school principal who moonlights as a Roy Orbison impersonator, and the one-legged female gold miner. Lende covers death in her community in all its forms—accidental, intentional and inevitable—and notes, "writing about the dead helps me celebrate the living." While comic, the book also has some sensitive, insightful anecdotes. For example, Lende, a contributor to NPR's Morning Edition, portrays the building of a coffin for a beloved mother by her youngest daughter; the sinking of a family boat with a tender farewell for a fearless fisherman; the mourning of a quirky, civic-minded "aging hippie"; and the goodbye to a Texas woman who hosted an annual Mississippi blues party. Lende's picture of an Alaskan small town is colorful and captivating. (June)

EXTREMES: Surviving the World's HarshestEnvironments
Nick Middleton.St. Martin's/Dunne, $24.95 (272p) ISBN 0-312-34266-7

In his latest quest to discover how people survive in severe climates, Oxford University geographer Middleton visited locations even worse than those in his last book, Going to Extremes. That work took him to Siberia and northeast India; this time, he seeks places without permanent towns, locations where "survival requires a lifestyle completely in tune with Nature's rhythms." Middleton's good-humored, almost naïve attitude makes his often treacherous explorations seem merely fun. He travels to remote, unlivable sites and visits indigenous people who live there happily. In Greenland, where four-fifths of the land is permanently ice-covered, an ice-sheet rescue worker teaches him to dig an emergency shelter within the frozen water. In Congo, Middleton hunts with locals and learns the dual role insects there play, as both pest and foodstuff. In Niger, he treks across sand dunes with Tuba women seeking date palms. Papua brings crocodile hunts and tree-house dwellers. Middleton wouldn't survive more than a few days in any of these places without the kindness of strangers, and their resourcefulness is striking. Unlike many books of its kind, the account doesn't bemoan environmental damage or displaced natives. Rather, it's a lighthearted and entertaining look at places most will never see. Agent, Doreen Montgomery. (June)

CRACKING THE MILLIONAIRE CODE: Your Key to Enlightened Wealth
Mark Victor Hansen and Robert G. Allen. Harmony, $23 (320p) ISBN 1-4000-8294-3

Chicken Soup coeditor Hansen and business writer Allen (Nothing Down) promote the idea that ultimate success is achieved through four key wealth codes: the Destiny Code (discovering your place in the universe); the Prism Code (finding the path to success); the Angel Code (building the right team); and the Star Code (finding the right customers). The codes form the basis of the chapters that follow, which specify how exactly to crack each one and to create an ultimate life's work. There is some useful advice, mainly on assembling the right support system, maximizing the potential of ideas and giving back. Unfortunately, these core concepts are made unnecessarily complex by a byzantine system of related buzzwords (Serendestiny, hundredfolding). The pace is further slowed by intermittent word puzzles that repeat key adages and by inspirational quotations at the perimeter of each page. Still, there's more than enough to inspire readers to make the connection between personal passion and wealth potential. 12-city author tour. Agent, Jillian Manus. (June 7)

THE LONG EMERGENCY: Surviving the End of the Oil Age, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century
James Howard Kunstler. Atlantic Monthly, $23 (320p) ISBN 0-87113-888-3

The indictment of suburbia and the car culture that the author presented in The Geography of Nowhere turns apocalyptic in this vigorous, if overwrought, jeremiad. Kunstler notes signs that global oil production has peaked and will soon dwindle, and argues in an eye-opening, although not entirely convincing, analysis that alternative energy sources cannot fill the gap, especially in transportation. The result will be a Dark Age in which "the center does not hold" and "all bets are off about civilization's future." Absent cheap oil, auto-dependent suburbs and big cities will collapse, along with industry and mechanized agriculture; serfdom and horse-drawn carts will stage a comeback; hunger will cause massive "die-back"; otherwise "impotent" governments will engineer "designer viruses" to cull the surplus population; and Asian pirates will plunder California. Kunstler takes a grim satisfaction in this prospect, which promises to settle his many grudges against modernity. A "dazed and crippled America," he hopes, will regroup around walkable, human-scale towns; organic local economies of small farmers and tradesmen will replace an alienating corporate globalism; strong bonds of social solidarity will be reforged; and our heedless, childish culture of consumerism will be forced to grow up. Kunstler's critique of contemporary society is caustic and scintillating as usual, but his prognostications strain credibility. (May)

DANCING AT THE DEAD SEA: Tracking the World's Environmental Hot Spots
Alanna Mitchell.Univ. of Chicago, $25 (239p) ISBN 0-226-53200-3

The itinerary of this winning pilgrimage is well-chosen to illustrate contemporary environmental crises. Mitchell, an environmental journalist at the Toronto Globe and Mail, visits some familiar disaster areas, including the island of Madagascar, whose deforestation by a populace hungry for land and firewood is wiping out a unique ecosystem; the dying Jordanian oasis of Azraq, whose aquifer has been drained to support development in Amman; and the Canadian High Arctic, where the native Inuvialuit people see apocalyptic portents in the warming of winters and thinning of sea ice. Mitchell also explores more hopeful locales, like Suriname, in South America, which has preserved 90% of its rainforest, and Iceland, which is using geothermal energy to wean itself off of fossil fuels and onto a hydrogen economy. Mitchell dusts her lucid, if sketchy, rundown of environmental issues with a sprinkling of ecotourist travelogue, as she visits Amazonian religious sites and goes scuba diving off the Galápagos Islands. She tries to tie it all together with a garbled interpretation of Darwinian evolution, writing that species "are programmed to continue to adapt... even if it means dying out." Extinction is not quite what Darwin meant by adaptation, but there's no doubt the great naturalist would be appalled by the panorama of ecological havoc described by Mitchell. (May 18)

ROCKETMAN: Astronaut Pete Conrad's Incredible Ride to the Moon and Beyond
Nancy Conrad and Howard A. Klausner, foreword by Neil Armstrong. New American Library, $24.95 (304p) ISBN 0-451-21509-5

Screenwriter Klausner (Space Cowboys), writing with astronaut Conrad's second wife, Nancy, brings a snappy, movie-dialogue feel to this biography of Charles "Pete" Conrad (1930–1999). Perhaps not as well remembered as some of his colleagues because his missions fell between the more famous ones, Conradflew on Gemini 5, which set a record for the most days in space up to that point, on Gemini 11, notable for rendezvousing and docking with a rocket on the first orbit, and commanded Apollo 12 on a glitch-free ride to the moon. A decade later, Conrad was called on to save the ill-fated Skylab, which had suffered crippling injuries on its journey into space. He showed that the best way to fix something was usually the simplest: a few good hard whacks with a hammer. Early in his career, Conrad was passed over for the Mercury program because he didn't have "the right stuff"—he got fed up with the intrusive medical exams and tossed his enema bag down on the commanding general's desk. But the public and Conrad's co-workers loved him for his hard-living, hard-working persona. Fans of the American space program will enjoy this fast read, which captures the bigger-than-life character of this gap-toothed, all-American space cowboy. Agent, Bill Gladstone. (May 3)

THE QUEST FOR THE ARK OF THE COVENANT: The True History of the Tablets of Moses
Stuart Munro-Hay. I.B. Tauris (Palgrave, dist.), $27.50 (304p) ISBN 1-85043-668-1

This sometimes fascinating, sometimes pedantic historical detective story, a follow-up to The Ark of the Covenant, grows out of Ethiopian traditions holding that the ark, the wooden box containing the tablets of Moses, was brought there in Solomonic times as a result of Solomon's marriage to the queen of Sheba. By the 16th century, the Church of Mary of Zion in Askum claimed to possess the ark. Acting as something of a modern-day Indiana Jones, Munro-Hay, who died as the book was going to press, delves into the documents that keep these legends alive. He discovers that the Kebra Nagast, the main book containing legends of the ark, provides more details about an altar stone than about a wooden box. The stone, likely a replica of the original tablets of Moses, served Ethiopian Christians as a connection to the ark. Munro-Hay concludes that the church at Askum never possessed the ark but rather the altar stone. Munro-Hay offers a charming glimpse into the Ethiopian side of this story, although his conclusions about the ark's legendary status echo those of generations of biblical scholars who have searched for the biblical relic. (May)

MIDNIGHT'S GATE
Bei Dao, trans. from the Chinese by Matthew Fryslie, edited by Christopher Mattison. New Directions, $19.95 paper (272p) ISBN 0-8112-1584-9

The writings in this volume by the internationally known Chinese dissident poetare called "essays," but read more like amalgamations after the fact of diary entries sorted by subject. They cover his many travels, from his native China—where he toiled as a concrete worker and iron mixer—to the California home he later inhabited and far-flung poetry conferences he has attended over the years. The pieces seem like the haphazardly arranged memories of a rootless man. And while most seem to have sprung somewhere in the distant past from a consideration of people who have crossed paths with the author over the course of his career, the book's title is taken from the most anomalous piece, which passionately discusses a trip he took as a member of a delegation of the International Parliament of Writers to visit an embattled Palestinian writer and his land. Chinese prose is very different in tenor and organizing principles than English, and translations can end up rather flat, so it's hard to say whether the weaknesses of this volume stem from the original composition or its translation. While it's occasionally insightful and contains a moment or two of sly wit, the prose remains strangely affectless and so completely unaffecting. (May 27)

NOT TONIGHT, HONEY: Wait 'Til I'm a Size 6
Susan Reinhardt. Kensington, $12.95 paper (224p) ISBN 0-7582-1124-4

Reinhardt slips Zoloft into her husband's tea for several weeks to cure him of an incessant need to clean and an overactive libido. She is matron of honor at her best friend's wedding—and ends up taking the minister's place when his colostomy bag malfunctions. She gives an interview while on bed rest due to irritable uterus syndrome and later winds up reading a headline on her "grumpy vagina." Obviously, syndicated newspaper columnist Reinhardt is the kind of woman who gets into endless scrapes, but she's as amused by them as readers are, and her book will appeal to lovers of the Sweet Potato Queens and Fanny Flagg. But there's another side to Reinhardt. Some of the essays in this collection are lyrical even as they pay tribute to old favorites: Southern women, pregnancy and motherhood. Most of all, the author knows that some days we, like her, come into work just to see what the "weirdos" are up to, and that we like the same thing in our nonfiction. And while her topics are sometimes predictable and her humor is sometimes crass, her heart is always in the right place, and her prose is often fresh and fun. Agent, Ethan Ellenberg. (May)

BIG SHOES: In Celebration of Dads and Fatherhood
Al Roker and Friends, edited by Amy Rennert. Hyperion, $26.95 (208p) ISBN 1-4013-0171-1

This collection of honest, straightforward examinations of fathers is sweet and well-meaning, though sometimes overwhelming in its sentiment. It shares father-child remembrances—of seeing movies together, eating sandwiches together, singing show tunes in the pool together—from Roker and other celebrities and quasi-celebrities, including actor B.D. Wong, NPR's Nina Totenberg, singer/songwriter Bonnie Raitt, wine maker Robert Mondavi and Roker's Today Show buddies Katie Couric, Ann Curry and Matt Lauer. Nearly every essay explores fatherhood from the point of view of a son or daughter, though the Daily Show's Jon Stewart explains it from a dad's standpoint. The key to paternity, he says, is low expectations: "I just hope that when I look at [my young son], he doesn't cry. In that sense, I've already achieved my goal." Donald Trump's one-pager reveals that his father taught him to "be responsible," while many other stories pertain to dad's encouragement, like LPGA Hall of Famer Amy Alcott's tale of how her pops taught her "everything was possible." Indeed, the book brims with happy memories, although there's the occasional regretful remembrance, too. In the final piece, Roker reminds readers that when dad's no longer here, it's up to his kids to fill his "Big Shoes" and keep walking. (May)

LILLIAN ROXON: Mother of Rock
Robert Milliken. Thunder's Mouth, $16.95 paper (384p) ISBN 1-56025-671-0

Lillian Roxon's Rock Encyclopedia (1969) remains a remarkable overview of the 1960s record industry, thanks to Roxon's consuming love for rock and roll and her fresh, colloquial style. Milliken's brisk, accessible portrait of the woman behind these insights has the flavor of Roxon's own writings, many of which are excerpted within. He details her problems with editors, her conflicts with her mother and her struggles with asthma (which killed her in 1973 at age 41). Roxon's first love died at 22, and two other central male figures in Roxon's life also died at early ages. Yet this book's overall tone is upbeat, evoking the period's optimism and excitement. Roxon's career started shakily at the Sydney Daily Mirror, where she developed a talent for impertinence, asking Brian Epstein during an interview, "Mr. Epstein, are you a millionaire?" Sydney journalist Milliken chronicles Roxon's relationship with Linda Eastman, a three-year bond that ended when Eastman dropped her best friend after marrying Paul McCartney. Roxon took revenge by slaughtering Eastman and McCartney in print, but this approach, born of personal rejection and pain, wasn't typical, and Milliken cites plenty of Roxon's balanced, compassionate pieces. This lively book is as much a portrait of a journalist as the era she covered. Photos. (May)

FAITH AT WAR: A Journey on the Frontlines of Islam, from Baghdad to Timbuktu
Yaroslav Trofimov. Holt, $26 (352p) ISBN 0-8050-7754-5

Trofimov covers Islamic culture for the Wall Street Journal, a wide beat that has him reporting stories from West Africa to Central Asia and even in Eastern Europe. This political travelogue includes dispatches from the front lines of the American invasion of Iraq and the subsequent attempts at creating a democratic regime. There are plenty of by now familiar stories of American troops and politicians bumbling through an increasingly resentful Iraqi society (including the deaths of an Italian diplomat and legitimate Iraqi politician at the hands of U.S. troops). But Trofimov gets fresh material on Saudi Arabia, where, despite severe economic downturns, men continue to hire thousands of foreign workers because they refuse to trust fellow "sex-obsessed" Saudis to chauffeur their wives who are forbidden from driving. By contrast, in the African nation of Mali, Islam exists comfortably alongside indigenous religions, resulting in a healthy democratic environment. If there isn't much of a theme to all this globe hopping beyond showing that Islam is a lot more diverse than most Americans realize, Trofimov puts just the right blend of cultural perspective and personal experience into his tour. Agent, Jay Mandel. (May 4)

GREENSPAN'S FRAUD: How Two Decades of His Policies Have Undermined the Global Economy
Ravi Batra. Palgrave, $24.95 (284p) ISBN 1-4039-6859-4

In 1987, Alan Greenspan was appointed chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Batra had a bestseller predicting a depression deeper than the Great Depression, lasting from 1990 to 1996. Batra's second book, two years later, predicting the crash of 1990 did less well, and his books predicting disaster in 1996, 1997, 1998 and 1999 found fewer readers, lucid as they were. Batra did correctly predict a stock market downturn in 2000, but erred by blaming the Y2K computer bug and forecasting high inflation and deep, long lasting negative growth. Now Batra has switched from predicting the future to criticizing the past. Readers expecting sensational charges will be disappointed. "This is not fraud in the legal sense," the author reassures us. Instead, Greenspan has "seriously afflicted the finances of millions of families." Batra faults Greenspan's views on social security, minimum wage, taxes and the trade deficit. As always, his economic arguments are expressed elegantly. Missing is a direct link to Greenspan, who had only a peripheral advisory role in these issues (his job is setting interest rates, financial policy and bank regulation) and voices only highly modulated views when he does give opinions. The misplaced focus weakens the sound economic arguments, and the title is sensationalized at best. 100,000 first printing. $100,000 ad/promo. (May 9)

TOP NAZI: SS General Karl Wolff: The Man Between Hitler and Himmler
Jochen von Lang, trans. from the German by MaryBeth Friedrich. Enigma, $29 (416p) ISBN 1-929631-22-7

A German expert on the Third Reich gives us this dense but useful biography of one of Heinrich Himmler's right-hand men. A youthful veteran of WWI, Wolff was a bank officer and advertising agent during the '20s, but rose rapidly in the ranks of the SS after joining the Nazis in the early '30s. He spent much of his career as Himmler's chief of staff, and the author establishes his numerous connections to the Holocaust and dismisses his postwar claims of ignorance. Wolff was also something of a "fixer," arranging for a German racing driver to escape penalties for marrying a woman of Jewish ancestry and planning a gigantic castle to be the meeting place of the senior SS officers as a new order of Teutonic nights. In the second half of the war, Wolff participated in abortive negotiations with the Soviets for a separate peace, commanded the SS in Italy and was involved in plans to seize the pope. The author's extreme thoroughness makes the book primarily a scholarly resource, but it is also a worthwhile portrait of a criminal with complex motives. (May)

CRUEL WORLD: The Children of Europe in the Nazi Web
Lynn H. Nicholas. Knopf, $35 (672p) ISBN 0-679-45464-0

Nicholas's acclaimed The Rape of Europa helped galvanize the return of Nazi-looted art. While this work is unlikely to have such practical impact, it demonstrates a similar breadth of research and historical compassion. She looks at the effect of Nazi policies on children as a recounting of the nonmilitary story of WWII. Casting a wide net, Nicholas examines such phenomena as the Kindertransports—in which Jewish children were brought from central Europe to England on the eve of the war—and the transport of supposedly "Aryan" Norwegian girls to Germany to breed. Nicholas shows how the Nazis tried, with varying degrees of success, to export their eugenic theories and racist ideology to the educational realm throughout occupied Europe. And focusing on the homeland of the Third Reich, she delineates how German children were socialized into Nazi culture. Relying on a prodigious amount of primary and secondary sources as well as interviews, she emphasizes the resilience of the young. "Most of Europe's children would, in the next few years, develop a self-protective shell of voyeurism and casualness toward the monstrous events around them." But as she notes in conclusion, the horrors of the war years stayed with those who saw them through young eyes. At times, Nicholas loses her focus, retelling the much-told story of the war itself. But there is no doubt that she has put together a well-written, compelling history that makes us look at the war era anew. 39 photos, 3 maps. (May 14)

STALIN'S FOLLY: The Tragic First Ten Days of World War II on the Eastern Front
Constantine Pleshakov. Houghton Mifflin, $26 (336p) ISBN 0-618-36701-2

The subtitle of this provocative and useful work by a noted historian (The Tsar's Last Armada) accurately describes its subject. The author supports the revisionist thesis that Stalin was not deceived about Hitler's ultimate intentions, only their timing, and was planning a preemptive attack into Poland and the Balkans—in 1942. Soviet deployments certainly make this plausible, as do other factors, such as the failure to build up defenses on the new Soviet border after stripping the old ones of most of their weapons and troops. The Germans, as is well known, struck first, and the result was a Russian military disaster of such proportions as to influence history to this day. The book is well-balanced, moving from the Kremlin, where Stalin was in denial and Zhukov was at least keeping his head, to soldiers of every rank from general to unarmed private. With his talent for assembling gripping narratives out of long-suppressed sources, Pleshakov will bring joy to fans of John Erickson. (May 5)

THE BODY NEVER LIES: The Lingering Effect of Cruel Parenting
Alice Miller, trans. from the German by Andrew Jenkins. Norton, $23.95 (160p) ISBN 0-393-06065-9

In her latest vehement treatise, Swiss psychoanalyst Miller (The Drama of the Gifted Child) reprises her classic critiques of filial duty. In her view, our culture systematically denies childhood abuse sufferers access to their true feelings. Repressed emotional responses to early humiliations and unfulfilled needs are inevitably transferred to the body, Miller believes, producing long-term illness. She also believes that the majority of therapists are bent on fostering an attitude of forgiveness. Miller instead urges the reader to reappraise the substance of the Fourth Commandment, which she construes as containing "a kind of moral blackmail" and, reflecting on her own unhappy childhood, argues that what survivors of parental cruelty need most is someone who shares their feelings of indignation. Miller traces the relationship between inadequate or tyrannical parenting and adult bodily illness, depression and suicide in pithy biographies of Dostoyevski, Chekhov, Kafka, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and many others. Yet Miller is more a subjective observer and a guru than a social scientist. Her highly personal, undertheorized and generalizing approach will strike some as simplistic, yet those who loyally follow her child-centered philosophy will probably find much to enjoy in the conviction with which she writes. (May)

THE LAST SELF-HELP BOOK YOU'LL EVER NEED: Repress Your Anger, Think Negatively, Be a Good Blamer, and Throttle Your Inner Child
Paul Pearsall. Basic, $24 (304p) ISBN 0-465-05486-2

Kudos to Pearsall (The Pleasure Prescription) for arguing against the "platitudes of self-empowerment" that dominate the self-help bookshelves. Their relentlessly upbeat tone and unrealistic idea of happiness will only make you feel worse, he says. Using research studies to bolster his points, Pearsall takes on the "McMorals, tenets about life that go down easily but aren't good for our long-term well being," as well as popular practitioners, such as Dr. Phil. Pearsall, an adjunct clinical professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, wants readers to stop being so self-centered. It's more important, he says, to love others before oneself, and appropriate guilt and anxiety are essential to learning to live a better life. "Stop expressing yourself," he says. "Shut up and listen." And don't avoid blaming: "Finding the right person to blame is essential for mental health." He explains cogently why such statements make more sense than the usual self-help shibboleths. Sometimes, particularly in chapters that tackle diet and aging, Pearsall sounds preachy and falls into the self-help trap of making generalizations without backup. But this contrarian volume gives readers plenty to consider and offers a hopeful and helpful approach to being mindful and fully engaged in each moment—good or bad. (May)

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