Web-Exclusive Reviews: Week of 7/10/2007

-- Publishers Weekly, 7/10/2006

NONFICTION

BLESSED AMONG NATIONS: How the World Made America
Eric Rauchway. Hill & Wang, $24 (256) ISBN 0809055805

American exceptionalism is an old idea, but in at least one respect, historian Rauchway (Murdering McKinley) argues, it reflects a geopolitical truth that remains relevant to current trends in globalization. From the Civil War to WWI, he finds, the country’s unique position in the global economy—unmatched flow of foreign capital and labor to its shores, expansive opportunities on the Western frontier—meant that the U.S., unlike European countries, was not forced to develop complex federal agencies to regulate commerce, assemble statistics, and provide for the unemployed. The small steps the U.S. did take in this direction, Rauchway contends, were distinctively shaped by the country’s relationship to globalization. Efforts to regulate credit and monopolies, he says, arose not in response to Socialist agitation but out of distrust of foreign bankers among recent migrants in the West. Lacking strong, centralized government institutions experienced in large-scale economic matters, the U.S. was unprepared after WWI to take the leading role in the global economy, a failure that, he argues, led to the Great Depression and would eventually scare Americans into supporting international financial organizations after World War II. Rauchway notes with concern that in the decades since the 1960’s, as the U.S. has shifted from international creditor to debtor, the country has again begun “edging away from its commitments to globalization” and leaving the international economy to take care of itself. Though he leaves the implications of his innovative historical analysis on the present largely implicit, he provides valuable perspective for the debate about American’s proper role in the world today. (July)

JOHN SUTTER: A Life on the North American Frontier
Albert L. Hurtado. Univ. of Okla., $34.95 (416p) ISBN 080613772X

Hurtado, a historian at the University of Okla., captures the rise and fall of an important and colorful immigrant to 19th-century California. Swiss expatJohn Sutter (1803–1880) arrived there in 1839 and founded a settlement called New Helvetia on the Sacramento River. But his thriving agricultural and commercial endeavors were crippled by the Gold Rush, as many of his laborers quit and headed to the mines. The strength of this study is Hurtado’s willingness to portray Sutter’s faults: his reliance on cheap, even enslaved, Indian labor; his efforts, when California entered the Union, to prohibit Indian suffrage. And Hurtado captures Sutter’s excesses: he was a lousy businessman who loved to spend rather than accumulate money, and he lived lavishly, purchasing “splendid clothes,” portraits of himself, and other trappings of wealth and success. Yet Hurtado often misses opportunities to bring Sutter’s story to life. The author’s treatment of the destruction by arson of Hurtado’s home, Hock Farm, in 1865 would have been vivid in the hands of a more artful writer, but Hurtado passes over the incident with a single paragraph. While this is likely to be the definitive scholarly biography of Sutter, it’s too plodding to appeal to a broad audience. 21 b&w illus., 3 maps. (Oct.)

THE SMALL-MART REVOLUTION: How Local Businesses Are Beating the Global Competition
Michael H. Shuman, foreward by Bill McKibben. Berrett-Koehler, $24 (200p) ISBN 1576753867

Shuman begins his book about the “local-first” movement by describing his annual trip to Wal-Mart to purchase a sturdy yet inexpensive pair of sneakers; he concludes it with a visit to his physical therapist, who tells him those same sneakers have exacerbated his chronic back pain. These two anecdotes provide context for Shuman’s thesis: locally owned businesses are more beneficial to their communities than massive chains like Wal-Mart. The author (Going Local: Creating Self-Reliant Communities in a Global Age) outlines strategies that small and home-based businesses—and, by extension, consumers, investors and policymakers—can follow to compete against the world's largest companies; his strategies hinge on going local, though some ideas are more credible than others (readers are advised to shop at locally owned businesses and do business with local banks, but to forego credit cards, as “nearly all credit card processing is nonlocal”). Shuman writes in a surprisingly lively and occasionally self-deprecating style uncommon to business texts, and his research is backed with hundreds of source notes. Though Shuman has his moments of naïve idealism, his “don’t get mad, get even” ideology will resonate with forward-thinking consumers and small business owners. (July)

THE SOMME: Heroism and Horror in the First World War
Martin Gilbert. Henry Holt, $27.50 (352p) ISBN 0805081275

Gilbert, the dean of WWI historians, recovers the pathos of personal experience by spotlighting the travails of small units and individual soldiers—mostly on the British side—who fought in the bloody battle of the Somme. Drawing on first-hand accounts, reminiscences by comrades, poignant letters home and snatches of soldiers’ poetry, Gilbert brings his subjects to life before closing each vignette with a notice of where the soldiers discussed lie buried—or at least memorialized, since the bodies of 73,000 of the dead were never identified. (Many detailed maps of both the battlefield and the resulting cemeteries are included.) Gilbert’s touch-and-go approach breaks up the narrative arc, but then the battle didn’t have much of an arc; there were attacks and counterattacks, bombardments and lulls, but the front lines scarcely moved before the fighting finally ended in mutual exhaustion. His superbly written, absorbing recreations of innumerable small life-and-death struggles makes the book a fitting commemoration of the tragedy. Photos. (July)

SOX AND THE CITY: A Fan’s Love Affair with the White Sox from the Heartbreak of ‘67 to the Wizards of Oz
Richard Roeper. Chicago Review, $19.95 (212p) ISBN 1556526504

Roeper’s mother was nine months pregnant with him when the Chicago White Sox made their losing stand at the 1959 World Series, beginning a post-season drought that wouldn’t end until their championship 2005 season. Roeper, a Chicago Sun-Times columnist and co-host of Ebert & Roeper, grew up an impenetrable and sometimes irritable Sox fan. Here, he examines the history and culture of Chicago’s second baseball team, and his personal history as a fan, with the kind of devotion usually reserved for family memoirs. He claims to have attended a thousand Sox games, and he adamantly argues why the South Side team will always be superior to the North Side Cubs. Naturally, Roeper (Schlock Value) peppers his narrative with movie references, as well as fun sidebars and details about long-forgotten games and players. His irreverent style—alternately witty and abrasive—recalls Chuck Klosterman’s essays on pop culture and music, and his take on such subjects as the old Comiskey Park and the joys of owning season tickets for a losing team are detailed, funny and quick. Sox fans will love this one, Cubs fans will mock it and the unaffiliated will better understand what it means to be a true baseball fan. (July)

WOMEN CONFIDENTIAL: Midlife Women Explode the Myths of Having It All
Barbara Moses. Marlowe, $15.95 paper (328p) ISBN 1569242704

“Having it all” was the battle cry of ’70s feminists euphoric at the realization they could shape their own lives. But many are now facing the second half of their lives having found that work in the “testosterone-fuelled corporate culture” isn’t all it was cracked up to be. And these days work is less a choice and more a necessity. Is this what women bargained for? And if it isn’t, what to do about it? In looking at these questions, Globe and Mail columnist Moses tills no new ground on the issue of women’s dissatisfaction at work and balancing it with all the personal roles. Nor does she offer solutions except for such overworked directives as “know and act on what is really important to you” and “cherish and grow your friendships.” What Moses (Career Intelligence) does is give voice to some of the many women she’s talked to over the years in her work as a writer and career coach and who have answered her online questionnaire—women who find themselves at midlife shaking their heads, muttering, “Wait a minute, is this really what I signed up for?” This may in and of itself be useful to some readers. As women in “consciousness raising groups” in the ’60s found out, there is power in identification; just be careful what you ask for. (Sept.)

LIFESTYLE

CUBA: The Land Of Miracles: A Journey Through Modern Cuba
Stephen Smith. Abacus (Trafalgar Sq., dist.), $15.95 paper (292p) ISBN 0349119678

A writer’s writer, Smith’s reportage is nearly flawless as he recounts his journey in search of the real Land of Miracles (a sardonic reference made by Cubans to the beautiful but impoverished island). In heat “like being swaddled in freshly steamed laundry, though not so aromatic,” Smith leads readers through formerly grand hotels, local religions that mix odd histories with blood sacrifice, and other unique cultural landmarks (the one horse town on “Treasure Island,” the 50-year-old cars, the weapons trade). Genuine and game, Smith is equally at ease recording a heart-to-heart with a down-and-out prostitute as he isa side-splitting account of a tango lesson in a tiny apartment, in which he learns how to hurl his partner “and save her in the nick of time from dashing her brains out against a refrigerator with a languid and yet utterly masculine catch.” A large cast of characters fleshes out Smith’s gutsy wanderings, including both Castro and his dissidents, one of whom sums up the island’s forlorn beauty and diminished spirit thusly: “After 36 years of repression … we’re an exhausted people… I believe that we’re peaceful—more prepared for receiving tourists than making war.” Though earmarked for travelers, this could easily become a classic look into the shuttered world of Cuba. (Aug.)

EATING AS I GO: Scenes from America and Abroad
Doris Friedensohn. Univ. of Kentucky, $60 (280p) ISBN 0813124026; $25 paper, -91645

In quiet tones, Friedensohn, a professor emerita of women’s studies at New Jersey City University, describes meals eaten and friendships formed over the years, both in the United States and abroad. The more engaging chapters in this first-person narrative, “Eat (Ethnic)! Eat (American)!” and “Kimchi Pride” center, respectively, on places such as the Phil-Am, a Filipino store and cafeteria-style restaurant in Jersey City, and on Korean cooking in New Jersey, Vermont and Korea. Friedensohn notes her own eating habits, as well as others’, clearly and sensuously: “She points an arthritic forefinger first to pancit (Filipino noodles), then to a chocolately brown pork adobo (pork belly marinated in vinegar, garlic and soy sauce), then to a sculptural wedge of chicherones (pork cracklings).” Especially rewarding is part four, “Cooking for a Change,” which recalls Friedensohn’s experiences in the Food Service Training Academy, a free 14-week job-training program sponsored by the Community FoodBank of New Jersey, which teaches “life skills as well as knife skills.” Here, Friedensohn focuses on “links (among) eating, poverty, and social policy,” topics not generally addressed in food-centric memoirs. Dispatches from countries such as Senegal, Tunisia and Austria prove less intriguing, but are minor let-downs in this otherwise enjoyable volume. 25 photos. (July)

RELIGION

DEAR CHURCH: Letters from a Disillusioned Generation
Sarah Cunningham. Zondervan, $12.99 paper (224p) ISBN 031026958X

First-time author Cunningham is a 20-something who feels ambivalent about and alienated from the church. In 14 letters, she vents her frustrations, telling the church why she is dissatisfied and letting other disgruntled Gen-X and Gen-Y readers know they are not alone. Her generation digs technology, but still craves human intimacy and community. They value “authenticity” and thus are suspicious of churches where worship seems too polished, too “preplanned,” too self-consciously cool. The Holy Spirit may move some people to leave their local church, and Cunningham thinks that’s okay, as long as they find Christian community somewhere else and refrain from gossiping about the members of their ex-church. The book is not wholly devoted to complaining; Cunningham also highlights the aspects of church life that give her hope. She loves the resiliency and flexibility of the church. And she loves Jesus, who was simultaneously anti-institutional and deeply committed to the church. Cunningham’s epistolary format is ironically gimmicky, drawing from the same wells as the inauthentic church services she critiques. Questions at the end of each chapter will help small groups who want to use this book as a jumping-off point for discussion, but ultimately, there is little here that hasn’t been said before. (Aug.)

ELEMENTAL WITCH: Discover Your Natural Affinity
Tammy Sullivan. Llewellyn, $14.95 paper (240p) ISBN 0738708917

Our age of specialization extends to the spiritual paths of Witches. With this new work of Sullivan’s (after Pagan Anger Magic), those who align themselves with the divine powers of nature can discern whether earth, water, air or fire best suits their sacred expressions. Sullivan says that elemental specialties are increasingly common in contemporary Witchcraft, and that seekers can use them to personalize their spiritual paths. She compiles a list of 44 thorough and probing questions to help determine affinities and offers rituals to meet the corresponding guides. Devoting roughly a quarter of the book to each element, Sullivan delves into the personality path, (cautionary) dark side, lore, mythology, rituals, recipes, stones and herbs connected with each element. Some information seems arbitrary, e.g. “Her [Water Witch] home décor is usually unthemed with whimsy being the main rule,” but generally Sullivan has pulled together a solid and fresh volume. It seems especially useful to have the mythology from far-flung traditions (Hindu, Yoruba, Native American, Hawaiian, etc.) pulled together under their elemental affiliations, thus creating something of a general interest read. However, this is not for rank beginners, for to fully realize the book, practitioners should already know such Witchcraft basics as how to cast circles and empower ingredients. (Aug.)

SACRED LISTENING: Discovering the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola
James L. Wakefield. Baker, $12.99 paper (224p) ISBN 080106614X

Most Catholics are familiar with the spiritual exercises of Ignatius Loyola, a series of meditations on the Gospels that are often said in retreats. Wakefield, a Lutheran pastor who is associate professor of biblical and spiritual theology at Salt Lake Theological Seminary, attempts to adapt the spiritual exercises for Protestants and the average Joe who would like to grow in prayer. As the Ignatian exercises are divided into four weeks, Wakefield separates his meditations into four “movements,” the full exercises taking at least 24 weeks. He succeeds in making the spiritual exercises accessible to the average believer: his language is simple and clear, allowing the reader to concentrate on the meditation, and the three parts of every day—Contemplatio, Meditatio and Oratio—provide a nice structure. His first two chapters are especially helpful in outlining the goals of the exercises and detailing how to keep a spiritual journal. While his preliminary comments to each unit and the text of his meditations introduce basic Ignatian themes and scriptural content, the four movements lack the depth of St. Ignatius’s mystical theology. However, this book does well in introducing Protestants of various denominations to contemplative prayer and provides a useful tool for meditating on the life of Christ. (Aug.)

POETRY

DOMAIN OF PERFECT AFFECTION
Robin Becker. Univ. of Pittsburgh, $14 paper (88p) ISBN 0822959313

The sixth full-length from the still-underrated Becker (The Horse Fair, 2000) uses sustained attention and deceptively quiet language to delve skillfully into familiar topics: Jewish heritage, lesbian culture, generational succession, and the ambivalent legacy of the Sixties. Describing her path from a radical youth to middleage , Becker’s verse remains careful and clear, much like Philip Levine’s in its sense of how poems ought to work (and Becker is at least as good a technician). Domestic objects and incidents—the obsolete laundry gadget called a mangle, the contents of a disused drawer—provide subjects and reasons for recollection: outsider artists (such as Donald Evans, who drew imaginary stamps) give her reason for elegiac praise. Becker’s few forays into closed forms (a pantoun, for example) display all the craft they require, never turning away from their subjects. Her free verse lines can grow pleasantly prickly, or even grim: “Against Pleasure” warns beachgoers about “jellyfish for the rest of the summer/ and the ozone layer full of holes.” Celebrations of amity and of erotic love counterpoint such sad reminders: a poem about a grand flood projects “a waterproof optimism, hoping to run into a few friends/ who’d taken the rain into their own hands and gone pelagic.” (Sept.)

FAMOUS
Kathleen Flenniken. Bison/Univ. of Nebraska, $17.95 paper (128p) ISBN 0803269242

Flenniken’s understated debut, winner of the Prarie Schooner Book Prize, weaves together two seemingly antithetical themes: the comic indignations and attractions of minor celebrities, and the everyday joys and sorrows of family life. A love of plainspoken language informs these ironically modest, lines: “I’m no smarter than Miss Scarlet in her// tawdry side-slit dress,” she writes, assuming the voice of Colonel Mustard from the board game Clue. Later poems consider the lives of somewhat famous figures, such as story writer Shirley Jackson and poet Edna St. Vincent Millay; their troubles sit uneasily beside Flenniken’s heartfelt portraits of her ailing, and now deceased, mother. Ordinariness—our need for it, and our frustrations with it—becomes Flenniken’s signature subject: the quietest evenings “make you what you are.” Flenniken sometimes errs on the side of modesty, making her speech consistently trustworthy but rarely elevated or exciting. She has fashioned a poetry comfortable with self-imposed limits: “Pray to the neighbor’s dog,” she urges, “who finally learned to live on a chain.” She still finds herself searching after mysteries, in board games, novels, and her own life, lauding “this idea that you could step out of your life/ unafraid, with no worldly need but to find who done it.” (Sept.)

FICTION

DIVA DIARIES
Janine A. Morris. Dafina, $14 paper (432p) ISBN 0758213042

Long-time best friends Jordan, Dakota and Chrasey are three New York African-American career women in their 30s who appear to have it all, but don’t: Jordan struggles to balance her law career and her marriage, much to her husband Omar’s displeasure; Dakota wants to settle down with Tony, but the bad boy music executive may not feel the same way about her; and Chrasey, overweight and ignored by husband Keith, is attracted to Trevor, the younger man she meets at a bus stop—who then shows up at same club where she and her girlfriends are partying. Morris, making her debut, sets things up nicely, but delivers a tale that’s less diary than desultory, and isn’t even in the first person. Too often, an intriguing scene concludes with a paraphrase, or begins with a rote set of character descriptions. All three primary male love interests are cheaters, all three women cheat on the men they love (more than once with the attendant complications for women). The result is more melodrama than drama. (July)

THE DOLPHIN SMILES
David Salvage. The Dragon Press, $24.95 (192p) ISBN 0976818108

Salvage’s ornately written debut follows the emotional evolution of Pamela, a depressive 32-year-old doctor whose backward-looking introspection exasperates her lover Bruna, a muscular, authoritarian Cuban woman she’s dated since medical school. Salvage introduces the pair on a flight from New York to a medical symposium in San Francisco; their relationship is unraveling and comes undone when Pamela meets Martine Lourmel, a mysterious, attractive French doctor who soon becomes Pamela’s obsession. Salvage interrupts the story of Pamela and Martine’s blossoming affair with a long chapter detailing Pamela’s therapy sessions, as she wrestles with the fact of her sister Iris’s schizophrenia and her mother’s death a decade earlier. With a bit of unlikely plotting, Salvage arranges an astounding coincidence, and Pamela and Martine discover they have more in common than just mutual attraction. Their visit to Iris in a Santa Cruz mental hospital provides a melancholy, graceful conclusion. Though Salvage brings a lush, emotive poetry to his first novel, he omits the narrative momentum that would make this a real erotic page-turner. (July)

HISTORY LESSON FOR GIRLS
Aurelie Sheehan. Viking, $23.95 (368p) ISBN 0670037672

Set in 1975, Sheehan’s second novel skillfully depicts an adolescent girl’s small but resonant steps toward adulthood; unfortunately, the bigger steps are handled with a bit too much theatricality. The teenage tendency toward obsession—whether for horses, a particular band or CD, or a single, all-consuming friendship—provides the fuel for this uneven suburban coming-of-age, capturing with artful simplicity the quotidian magic of an improbable friendship. Unpopular 13-year-old Alison Glass, new to Weston, Connecticut and afflicted with scoliosis, and the popular, independent Kate Hamilton discover one another and the world. Sheehan nails important adolescent moments like playing it cool when offered a first cigarette or having one’s taste in music scrutinized by a new friend. The quiet pleasures of the pair’s private moments clash with increasingly stagy subplots: Alison’s persistent fear of undergoingsurgery to correct her spine, the over-the-top violence of Kate’s drunk, greedy father, and the indiscrete affair between him and Alison’s hippie mother. Sheehan perceptively identifies the outside world as a corrupting agent in fragile friendships; however, as Kate herself comments, “It’s usually not so damn obvious.” (July)

THE PLAYER’S BOY
Bryher. Paris Press, $15 paper (224p) ISBN 1930464096

An English novelist and patron of artists such as H.D., Bryher (Winifred Ellerman, 1894-1983) first published this beautifully realized story of a young Elizabethan actor’s apprentice in 1953. After the death of James Sands’s beloved Master Awsten, one of the Queen’s Players who has taught Sands the rudiments of acting, Sands travels from Southwark, London and passes through a succession of employers. At a house in the country, he meets the summering playwright Francis Beaumont, in the process of writing his play Philaster. James wins the part of Bellario, the girl page disguised as a boy for love of Philaster, who in a curious royal menage-a-trois sends Bellario to serve his beloved Arethusa; James duly falls in love, unrequitedly, with Beaumont’s virginal fiancee, Ursula. History intrudes offstage in the form of Sir Walter Ralegh’s execution and the ascent of the Puritans, and James, now a clerk, becomes a kind of poignant anachronism, too delicate for the coarsening new age. Theatrical and romantically lyrical, Bryher’s novel is a forgotten gem, channeling the servant boy’s first person flawlessly. (July)