Web-Exclusive Reviews: Week of 5/14/2007

-- Publishers Weekly, 5/14/2007

NONFICTION

ALICE COOPER, GOLF MONSTER: My Twelve Steps to Becoming A Golf Addict
Alice Cooper with Keith and Kent Zimmerman. Crown, $24.95 (288p) ISBN 9780307382658

With his first book, Cooper, the original shock rocker, attempts to combine autobiography and golf manual in one snappy narrative; that both parts are equally half-baked hardly matters, as Cooper's simple, frank account of his 40-plus years in the rock and roll biz is great entertainment. Cooper started playing golf in the early 1980s—as many as 36 holes a day—to fill his post-rehab days and keep him from the destructive spiral of alcoholism. Thus, golf plays a vital role in this memoir; indeed, without golf, Cooper might no longer be alive—and not incidentally, the rock legend has since become one of the best players on the pro-am tournament circuit. Cooper devotes 12 sections to his "steps of golf addiction" ("Be a Good Imitator," "Let the Adreneline Flow," "Play with Those who Inspire You"), interspersed between short chapters that present a Cliff's Notes version of his life. Revelations include the truth behind the infamous 1969 incident in which Cooper threw a live chicken into a rabid Detroit audience, an unexpected backstage encounter with Liberace and Cooper's late-life conversion to Christianity. While there's more here for fans of Alice Cooper's music than his fellow golfing nuts, the man deserves credit for finding a way to tell his life story that's as unconventional as the life itself. (May)

THE DIP: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (And When to Stick)
Seth Godin. Penguin/Portfolio, $12.95 (96p) ISBN 9781591841661

Yet another easily digestible social marketplace commentary from the blogger/author who penned Purple Cow and Small is the New Big, Godin prescribes a cleverly counter-intuitive way to approach one's potential for success. Smart, honest, and refreshingly free of self-help posturing, this primer on winning-through-quitting is at once motivational and comically indifferent, making the lofty goal of "becoming the best in the world" an achievable proposition—all you need is to "start doing some quitting." The secret to "strategic quitting" is seeking, understanding and embracing "the Dip," "the long slog between starting and mastery" in which those without the determination or will find themselves burning out. As such, Godin demonstrates how to identify and quit your "Cul-de-Sac" and "Cliff" situations, in which no amount of work will lead to success. Godin provides tips for finding your Dip, taking advantage of it and becoming one of the few (inevitably valuable) players to emerge on the other side; he also provides guidelines for quitting with confidence. Quick, hilarious and happily irreverent, Godin's truth—that "we fail when we get distracted by tasks we don't have the guts to quit"—makes excellent sense of an often-difficult career move. (May)

I DIDN'T KNOW THAT: From "Ants in the Pants" to "Wet Behind the Ears"—The Unusual Origins of the Things We Say
Karlen Evins. Scribner, $9.95 (176p) ISBN 9781416532385

This handy reference provides history for a slew of terms and turns of phrases Americans use nearly every day. A Tennessee radio producer and on-air personality, Evins has been "collecting words, phrases, and expressions" for decades, and even self-published a version of this book nearly 15 years ago. Here, she expands on her original, starting at "A-1" ("More than a steak sauce…it was the highest rating that could be given a ship insured by Lloyd's of London") and ending with "zipper" ("trademarked by B.F. Goodrich in 1925…for a new line of waterproof overshoes"). Among others, Evins covers "peanut gallery," which originally referred "to the cheap seats…in the theaters of the Gay Nineties"; "fighting fire with fire," to try containing one prairie blaze by setting another; and "mind your p's and q's," dating back either to British pubs serving both pints and quarts, or to the early days of printing, when typesetters occasionally confused the two letters. In clear, brief and tidy prose, Evins provides interesting, occasionally fascinating tidbits for one English idiom after another, making this a small treasure trove for word-junkies, crossword puzzlers and other armchair linguists. (May)

THE PEEBLES PRINCIPLES: Tales and Tactics from an Entrepreneur's Life of Winning Deals, Succeeding in Business, and Creating a Fortune from Scratch
R. Donahue Peebles. Wiley, $24.95 (224p) ISBN 9780470099308

For those who dream of becoming power brokers—sophisticated but not flamboyant, confident but not egotistical, a master dealmaker never defeated by setbacks, and all without losing your integrity—you'll want to invest in this delicious account of wheeling, dealing and (other people's) stealing. Reading like a novel—with subplots galore—this title from the CEO of the largest African-American-owned real estate development firm in the country illustrates Peeble's ten principles for achievement while recounting his rise to power. It's hard not to like Peebles, an affable guide whose grandfather was a Washington D.C. doorman for 41 years, and whose grandson now owns a Marriott in the same city. Through the series of mind-boggling moves that put him on top, Peebles shows how his early success "was based on my ability to control some essential aspect of the deal.…in the classic terms of supply and demand[,] you've got to control one or the other." Peebles is unafraid to draw back the curtain, using failures as well as triumphs to formulate his principles, among them "Be the last man standing" and "If the key is not working, be prepared to change the lock." A master at positioning his development bids as the most logical choice—which he does again and again—Peebles shows how "a fair shot at winning" is the only advantage one needs to succeed. (Apr.)

OUT OF THE WOODS: A Bird Watcher's Year
Ora E. Anderson, edited by Deborah Griffith. Ohio Univ., $28.95 (184p) ISBN 9780821417416; $16.95 paper -23

The life of journalist, conservationist and artist Anderson (1911-2006) spanned nearly the entire 20th century; as such, he witnessed the enormous changes—technological, medical and economic—that left few untouched wildlands in the state of Ohio and the nation at large. The woods he wanders in these short essays, written in the final years of his life, are those he planted with his wife on the 92-acre farm they purchased in 1956 (and which became, after his death, a conservatory). Reporting on season-by-season changes, Anderson notes the arrival of birds in spring and their departure in fall, the ducklings and goslings reared on his ponds and the disruptions caused by beavers and deer—seemingly minor events that make for undeniably pleasurable reading. Essays are interspersed with vivid poems, haiku-like in their verbal parsimony and eloquent in their evocation of time and place. Anderson was also a woodcarver, who recreated the birds he observed in "basswood and water tupelo," and he riffs charmingly on a number of different species and varieties in prose that's generously peppered with rueful observations and bemused wonder. Filled with precise description and pithy metaphor, expressive description and elegant phrasing, this book is a joy to read and rewards subsequent revisits with stylistic wit and wild beauty. (May)

PUNK ON 45: Revolutions on Vinyl 1976-79
Gavin Walsh. Plexus, $24.99 (160p) ISBN 9780859653701

Here, author and collector Walsh (God Save the Sex Pistols) examines original punk rock album art on hundreds of records from the chaotic, triumphant early years of punk through New Wave, Third Wave and beyond. The broad reach of punk is a frequent topic; Walsh notes early on that the term "punk," borrowed from 1972 garage band anthology Nuggets, is entirely insufficient to describe an "eclectic vanguard" of acts like Television, Blondie, the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, Gang of Four, the Talking Heads, XTC and the Dead Kennedys. At its inception, Walsh also notes, the punk sound wasn't new—but the attitude was, and the groundbreaking album visuals displayed here show how that attitude became a huge force in design, illustration, photography and fine art. Dominated by hundreds of sleeves, this glossy, full-color volume often interrupts Walsh's informal but informative prose with pages of them. Fortunately, captions are just as detailed as Walsh's main text. Most of the innumerable artists Walsh mentions are from the US and UK, but other parts of the world are represented in the "Global Punk" chapter (including Australia's The Saints, France's Metal Urbain and Canada's DOA). Though an index would have made finding one's favorites much easier, this slick, shiny tour through the most colorful aspects of the 1970s scene is quite detailed—if not particularly deep—and perfect for gifting or browsing. (May)

RICHARD M. NIXON
Elizabeth Drew. Times, $20 (192p) ISBN 9780805069631

Drew, a long-time political journalist who covered the Watergate scandal, reminds readers in her excellent addition to the American Presidents series that Nixon was more than the scandal that forced him from office. Nixon's forays into domestic policy matters like welfare and economic reform were eclipsed by his focus on the foreign policy issues he savored. His doggedness produced the twin triumphs of his presidency: the diplomatic openings to the Soviet Union and China. But he failed to end the war in Vietnam, and his strategic miscues (such as the bombing of Cambodia) brought about public unrest and sowed the seeds of the Watergate debacle. Though details of Nixon's personal life are sparse, Drew does a commendable job of conveying his personal quirks, and the chapter on Watergate deftly conveys the angst over White House skullduggery that gripped Washington as the nation began to grasp the enormity of the scandal. The author's account of Nixon's inglorious departure from public life and his largely successful attempts to reinvent himself, are tinged with both amazement and disdain, and in a stinging rebuke to her subject, she concludes that there are "large doubts" that Nixon was "fit to occupy the most powerful office in the nation." Readers who lived through the tumult and those new to the period will find much to commend in this crisp biography. (May)

A RUSSIAN DIARY: A Journalist's Final Account of Life, Corruption, and Death in Putin's Russia
Anna Politkovskaya. Random, $25.95 (400p) ISBN 9781400066827

One cannot read these journals without the awful knowledge that their author, Politkovskaya (1958-2006), paid for them with her life, shot in the head in front of her Moscow apartment on October 7 (President Vladimir Putin's birthday). Internationally known as one of the few Russian journalists fearless enough to report Russian news independent of Kremlin spin, she was a relentless and vociferous critic of Putin, reporting on his abuses in the Chechen war and his attempts to retract Russia's fledgling democratic freedoms. Covering December, 2003 to August, 2005, Politkovskaya records with dismal and sardonic exactitude the encroaching power of the State, dismantling private businesses, shuttering media outlets and squeezing more money out of its citizens, practically plunging the country into Communist-era conditions. Both the farcical policies and individual crimes of the government are documented and scrutinized: instituting life sentences for suicide bombers, as well as the attempted cover up of an 18-year-old Private beat to death by his superiors. Rounding out the bleak scene are opposition parties that prove fractious, disorganized, craven and predictably willing to sacrifice principle for power. Politkovskaya suffers nobly—and eloquently—in this semi-daily account, yet one must wonder how similarly she would have suffered amidst the capitalist excesses of the West. A rare and intelligent memoir—if an entirely depressing one—this will give readers a detailed look into Russia's everyday march towards totalitarianism. (May)

SENIOR YEAR: A Father, a Son, and High School Baseball
Dan Shaughnessy. Houghton Mifflin, $24 (240p) ISBN 9780618729050

Caustic Boston Globe columnist Shaughnessy, bete noir of many a Red Sox fan, dials back the snark to tell a parent's story—his son, Sam's, senior year of high school, and the baseball season that accompanies it. Giving a chapter to each month, Shaughnessy tells of the prom, late-night parties and college visits that can make senior year stressful for parent and student alike; though, comparing his own experience to his son's, Shaugnessy frequently finds Sam has an easier go of it, snagging dates and above-average grades with equal ease. The young man's story really unfolds on the baseball diamond, where his considerable talents as a power hitter bring him the attention of Division I college programs. However, success doesn't do much to protect him from adolescent depression; as Sam writes in his college application essay, "When I go 0-4, I want to hang myself in the closet." Though Shaughnessy rests on too many "back in my day" digressions, anybody whose kid has played on a team will identify with him, sweating out each at-bat in the bleachers. Baseball fans will enjoy the book on another level, as well, not only for the detail with which Shaughnessy renders his son's games, but also for candid tales of legends like Earl Weaver and Reggie Jackson. (May)

SONGS IN THE KEY OF MY LIFE
Ferentz Lafargue. Broadway/Harlem Moon, $12.95 paper (192p) ISBN 9780767924061

Recalling Nick Hornby's Songbook and Rob Sheffield's more recent Love is a Mix Tape, Lafargue's memoir chronicles life events major and minor through the prism of the music he loves and hates. Lefargue found the genesis for his book while struggling through the aftermath of a failed engagement, during which he discovered Stevie Wonder's breakthrough double album, Songs in the Key of Life. Beginning with the miraculous turnaround that album inspired, the professor and Brooklyn resident recounts, among other amusing anecdotes, his mother's mad crush on mid-1980s sensation Billy Ocean; his own impressions and imitations of Michael Jackson, "who danced like Fred Astaire, sang like Jackie Wilson, had the suave good looks of a young Sam Cooke, and dressed like Liberace"; and the link between Stanley Kubrick's film Full Metal Jacket and 2 Live Crew's "obscene, misogynist, and offensive" album As Nasty as They Wanna Be. The book's biggest weakness may be Lefargue's lack of credentials; without rock critic Sheffield's reputation or Hornby's fan base, readers may wonder why they should care about one man's taste in music. Lafargue may not provide that reason, but he does have a sincere, honest voice and a story that any pop music fan is sure to nod along with. (May)

STRANGERS IN PARADISE: A Memoir of Provence
Paul Christensen.Wings Press, $17.95 (220) ISBN 9780916727285

Christensen, a poet, editor and author of over a dozen books (most recently Falling from Grace in Texas), has crafted a memoir of his part-time residency in Provence that avoids the familiar with unique experience and a fluid style that separates it from other an-American-in-Europe journals. What makes Christensen's expatriate tale unique is how much of it he spends in Texas; while he teaches there during the academic year, his wife and three children lived in Provence without him, and the most interesting portions of his sometimes meandering narrative involve his ambivalence over watching his children become French. Christensen's other gift is for capturing perfect details of Provencial life, as in his description of an art gallery: "There were no geniuses around, only a few shy attempts to paint one's gratitude for the light or the wild flowers." This gift for lovely writing occasionally drifts into melodramatic territory ("I thought keenly of my deceased brother... he shimmered over the twilit air and seemed to almost touch my face"). It seems that this slim book could have used a tighter edit, but there is much here to appreciate, particularly for those with fond memories of France. Photographs. (May)

WAY OFF THE ROAD: Discovering the Peculiar Charms of Small-Town America
Bill Geist. Broadway, $23.95 (256) ISBN 9780767922722

CBS roving correspondent and author Geist offers up an amusing and expansive collection of America's quirky, strange and offbeat nooks. The "Land of Lost Luggage" in Scottsboro, Ala., for instance, is where the millions of bags airlines "lose" every year wind up and "every day is like Christmas" for the locals. In New Glarus, Wis., photographer Kathy DeBruin has a reputation as the "Annie Leibovitz of cow portraiture." And then there's Boston's Museum of Dirt, where, among other amazing dirt is a display of dirt taken from Barry Manilow's driveway. While mirth is in plentiful supply, some of Geist's stories are real nail biters, such as his trip via mule train to deliver mail to the Havasupai Native American tribe. (Its members live on the floor of the Grand Canyon.) Geist's low key, deadpan humor hits the mark, and he has a gentle way of writing just to the point of ridicule before he backs off. Readers will find nearly 30 tales that will amaze and amuse and maybe inspire some extra stops on their next road trip. (May)

WHY GOOD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE
Stephen Post and Jill Neimark, foreword by Reverend Otis Moss Jr. Broadway, $23.95 (320p) ISBN 9780767920179

Post, a professor of bioethics at Case Western Reserve University, outlines, as the book's subtitle puts it, "the exciting new research that proves the link between doing good and living a longer, healthier, happier life." With former Psychology Today features editor Neimark, Post cites a raft of studies (some of it funded by his Institute for Research on Unlimited Love) showing that qualities like gratitude, celebration, forgiveness and compassion are not only good for the recipients of your generosity—they're good for you too, leading to better health and longer life. Post details a self-help program based on his Love and Longevity Scale, tested on 339 college students, to measures how high you score on each quality. He also offers anecdotes (like the story of a five-year-old girl who forgave the shooter whose bullet paralyzed her) and advice to illustrate how to practice altruistic qualities. Forgiveness, for example, can be pursued through a Buddhist breathing meditation or by communing with a higher power. Post's advice to spend time helping others is grounded not only in research but in an optimistic faith in human nature. (May)

WHY THE SKY IS BLUE: Discovering the Color of Life
Götz Hoeppe; trans. from the German with John Stewart. Princeton Univ., $29.95 (376p) ISBN 9780691124537

Already a bestseller in Germany, this book examines the enigma of the blue sky, a phenomenon pursued from Aristotle to medieval Arab philosophers to Renaissance thinkers and present-day planetologists. Hoeppe's range is encyclopedic, covering Greek cosmology, Da Vinci's groundbreaking exploration of color, Newton's discovery of the visible light spectrum and the consequent optics revolution, Huygens subsequent suggestion that light is transmitted as waves, and even poet Goethe's experimental attempts to explain the nature of the color blue. The history that Hoeppe recounts is so rich in ideas and personalities (such as the mountaineering scientist, Tyndall, who discovered the greenhouse effect, and the future Lord Rayleigh, who courted his would-be wife with a book on the physics of sound) that it's easy to become almost as engrossed as the passionate subjects themselves. Hoeppe puts life back into great scientists—all too often reduced, in present usage, to mere adjectives (Brownian motion, Maxwell's laws, etc.)—explaining clearly how their discoveries hang together, how their personal lives and social situations influenced their science, and how the simplest question—why is the sky blue?—has stimulated more than 2,000 years of human exploration. (May)

THE ZEN OF FISH: The Story of Sushi, from Samurai to Supermarket
Trevor Corson. HarperCollins, $24.95 (368p) ISBN 9780060883508

To the uninitiated, few things can be more intimidating than a sushi bar. Though the process of ordering and eating sushi isn't nearly as involved as some would think, it does require a certain amount of knowledge and etiquette to dine properly. Thankfully, Corson (The Secret Life of Lobsters) presents an exhaustive look at sushi and the chefs who prepare it that will go a long way toward instilling confidence. Alternating between the cuisine's history and the key steps in a sushi chef's education, Corson puts the reader in the thick of things a la Michael Ruhlman's Making of a Chef, detailing the laborious process of making rice, the preparation of a myriad of fish and the storied history of the California Roll. Corson covers close to thirty plants and animals over the course of the book, which becomes a bit wearying, but his structure prevents the material from overwhelming readers and his enthusiasm for the topic is infectious—especially when the subject turns to the popularity of sushi in landlocked states or the perils of dealing with mackerel. Given the breadth and scope of the book (a bibliography and source list are included), Corson has created what could be the definitive work on the topic, enabling customers to comfortably and confidently stride into a sushi restaurant and order omakase without trepidation. Corson seems to sense this, as an addendum regarding sushi bar etiquette closes with the admonishment, "Most experts agree on one thing. Customers who show off their sushi knowledge are tiresome. Chefs appreciate customers who would rather eat sushi than talk about it." (June)

LIFESTYLE

MY BOMBAY KITCHEN: Traditional and Modern Parsi Home Cooking
Niloufer Ichaporia King. Univ. of Calif., $27.50 (384p) ISBN 9780520249608

In this charming volume, an independent food scholar explores her Parsi heritage and provides a wide range of recipes that should prove revelatory even for home cooks used to whipping up a biryani at a moment's notice. Though it shares similarities with other subcontinental cuisines—a reliance on ghee, a taste for curry, a deep affection for vegetables—Parsi food is unique in many ways, hinting at its Persian ancestry with ample use of eggs, while nodding toward Europe through savory custards and rich desserts. Many recipes are both unusual and deeply comforting: onions, young garlic, and leeks turn rich and buttery in an Allium Confit, and Braised Greens, spiked with cayenne, are vegetables gone to heaven. Cauliflower, eggs and grated cheese take a decadent turn in Mother's Wobbly Caulfilower Custard. King even makes organ meats appealing: Chicken Livers in Green Masala is a luscious take on the underused ingredient, bright with cumin, chiles and coriander. King also has novel uses for goat brains, kid's trotters and tongue, an intriguing challenge for intrepid home cooks. Perhaps most delightful is her brief introduction to Parsi history and culture, which tells both the author's story as an Indian expatriate in Berkeley, and the fascinating background of one of the world's most sophisticated cuisines. (June)

ILLUSTRATED

MUTTS
Sharon Montrose. Stewart, Tabori & Chang, $19.95 (120p) ISBN 9781584795797

Having previously focused her camera on purebreds and puppies (Dauchshunds: Lightweights Littermates), Montrose turns her lens on crossbreeds of all kinds in this playful coffee table book. Her photos—one of each subject—bring out the sparkle, intelligence, and sheer cheekiness of these rangy dogs. Intentionally stark, each dog is set against an all-white background, largely without props, and usually one dog per photo. That the resulting portraits are so engaging, and so deeply revealing of canine personality, is a measure of Montrose's skill, patience and camaraderie with her subjects. Her subjects are incredibly expressive—including a disgusted (or is that terrified?) terrier-chihuahua mix, a confused boxer-pit bull, and an akita-siberian husky-wolf mix touched with pure joie de vivre—and the occasional break from form—Pebbles and Bam-Bam, two collie-sheperd-retrievers, are photographed together; a two-photo sequence shows a very pregnant terrier-dachshund, followed on the next page by her seven puppies—make for happy surprises. The book has no text beyond the names of the dogs and their presumed parentage, which might cause some frustration—one does wonder what Beans, the terrier-cattle dog mix, did to cause him so much chagrin—but the priceless expressions on these mutt's mugs is worth the price of admission. (May)

FICTION

A luminous portrait by a fictitious artist is at the heart of Terrell's disappointing debut thriller. The painting actively links three separate story lines, presented in alternating chapters. A 17th-century Dutch artist creates a painting as a tribute to his lover and his Catholic faith; in 194's Amsterdam, Erich Baum is shipping his precious artwork to France for safekeeping; a present-day Manhattan attorney defends an auction house against claims by a Dutch woman that the Nazis stole the painting from her family. It's a promising plot structure, but that promise is buried under repetitious explanations of the legal issues, inept pacing and awkward dialogue. Former litigator Terrell earnestly wants to focus on questions of morality and betrayal across three centuries, but her artless writing frustrates those ambitions. (May)

CRUEL POETRY
Vicki Hendricks. Serpent's Tail, $14.95 paper (312p) ISBN 9781852429270

Renata—called Rennie by friends, lovers, and people who pay her for sex, which is to say just about everyone in Miami Beach—doesn't so much like living dangerously as she likes doing fun things that happen to be dangerous. One of those fun things is Richard, an English professor who's risking his marriage by continuing to see Rennie but just can't help himself. Her reckless allure has also captivated her colleague Francisco and her next door neighbor Julie, who eavesdrops on Rennie's exploits and struggles to turn them into the great American novel. The blood, lust and drama are vivid and visceral, but Hendricks is so determined to avoid trite lessons and happy endings that she fails to assemble any kind of ending at all, relying instead on entropy and disaster to bring her story stumbling to a halt. These exquisitely developed characters deserve better. As Hendricks refines her hallmark noir style, perhaps she'll get a better handle on which clichés are worth keeping. (May)

THE DEVIL'S MAMBO
Jerry A. Rodriguez. Kensington, $12 paper (288p) ISBN 9780758217103

Ex-homicide detective and Navy SEAL Nick Esperanza dives deep into New York's sexual underworld in this graphic, gritty first novel. Esperanza has everything: he's a $30 million Lotto winner, retired at 40, madly in love with his gorgeous girlfriend, Legs, and singing the occasional song in his thriving salsa club. When Legs's niece disappears, he reluctantly agrees to take a break from the good life to scout around. Playwright and filmmaker Rodriguez gives his Puerto Rican Spenser a standard supporting cast—an FBI agent brother, a fellow former SEAL running club security—and starts out mostly painting by the numbers. Then the trail leads to kiddie porn ring the Candyland Club and its sadomasochistic enforcers, and Esperanza's taste for kinky sex meets its match in the vicious Mistress Devona Love, who reduces the once cocksure investigator to a quivering heap in the book's best and raunchiest scene. The squeamish may wince as Esperanza does his desperate and dark dance down the wild side. (May)

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING DANGEROUS
David Dante Troutt. Harper Collins/Amistad, $24.95 (352p) ISBN 9780060789299

Set in New York City in the mid 1990s, this uneven thriller from Rutgers law professor Troutt (The Monkey Suit) delivers a somewhat murky political message. Attractive single mother Sidarra, a frustrated employee of what she's derisively renamed the Department of Miseducation, struggles to make ends meet. Her chance attendance at a Harlem investment seminar leads her into a criminal alliance with Griff, a hunky defense attorney trapped in an unhappy marriage, and computer whiz Yakoob, whose skills enable the trio to steal credit information from rich whites who they think have harmed the black community. Sidarra, an idealist who chafes at the corporate, child-unfriendly approach of her bosses, lines her pockets with few qualms. The explicit sex scenes between Sidarra and Griff do nothing to advance the plot or develop the characters, while the finale will come as no surprise. (May)

MOSCOW RACETRACK
Anatoly Gladilin, trans. from the Russian by Robert P. Schoenberg and Janet G. Tucker. Overlook, $13.95 paper (224p) ISBN 9781585679034

Billed as "a novel of espionage at the track," this quirky book, which was first published in the U.S. in 1990, will appeal most to students of recent Russian history. Gladilin, a Russian emigre now living in France and best known as one of the pioneers of his native country's Young Prose movement, writes incisively about the Russian Revolution through the controversial views of his hero, an academicknown simply as the Teacher. Supplementing the political commentary are notes on horses slated to run at a Moscow racetrack as well as a plot involving a government plan to use the Teacher's gambling skills to raise money for the Soviet regime. This curious blend may leave some readers scratching their heads and others wondering what the book would have been like without the diverting interludes, the relevance of which is less than apparent. (June)

THE TWILIGHT HOUR
Elizabeth Wilson. Serpent's Tail, $14.95 paper (256p) ISBN 9781852424770

British commentator Wilson (The Lost Time Café), whose nonfiction focus is feminism and popular culture, does little with her intriguing choice of period in this unremarkable historical whodunit. 1947 London is beset both by a record-breaking freeze and by the country's bumpy return to normalcy after the traumas of WWII. Against this background, Wilson has placed a young and callow heroine, Dinah Wentworth, a newly-married socialite whose naïveté (and penchant for exclamation points) will grate on some readers. Wentworth's dull existence is brightened when her filmmaker husband, Alan, falls in with a mysterious Romanian film director, Radu Enescu, and his leading lady, Gwendolen Grey, who want to use him to write the screenplay for a romantic feature film. After Dinah stumbles across a corpse, she panics and doesn't notify the authorities, leading to predictable complications. An unsurprising solution to the murder and unconvincing period detail leaves readers as cold as the London winter. (May)

POETRY

GARAGE
Aaron Fagan. Salt, $14.95 paper (76p) ISBN 9781844713455

Resolute, understated, and sometimes sullen, the debut volume from New York City-based Fagan explores the poet's doubts about his vocation and his doubts about the worth of his art. A long poem set "at Zebra Lounge in Chicago" recalls, "My beer was empty/ And I had nothing to say./ Who knows what to say?" Another muses, "No need for a poem/ To commemorate how inarticulate we are." Other pages chronicle post-collegiate dejection, a young man's war on still-undeclared ambitions, or else attempt with measured irony to scale back the pretensions, and the inflated symbols, prior poets have tried to use. Children in "Recall" remain enraptured when adults grow bored and sad; a poem about waking up gets titled "My Arrogance." Though the title refers to the poet's tastes in underground rock and dance music, that music is little in evidence here; more evident is the self-mocking, saturnine temper of such precursors as Alan Dugan (from whom Fagan takes an appropriate epigraph) or even Howard Nemerov. Yet even these anti-lyrics and bedroom palinodes strive towards apt purposes: this poet so given to humble skepticism he still tries to believe that "each thing we make/ Results from the wild permutations of love." (June)

THE HAPPINESS EXPERIMENT
Lisa Fishman. Ahsahta (SPD, dist.), $16 paper (86p) ISBN 9780916272944

Nothing in Fishman's laconic earlier books would have predicted the dreamy, impressive exuberance in this, her third: the poet depicts her rural surroundings, their precedents in classical pastoral, and her own, generously drift-prone imagination in these lyrical sequences, exploring attachments geographic, georgic, erotic and maternal. "Darken the roses dried on the lamppost," one of a few poems called "Calendar," instructs; "thud thud in the weather/ all trembling kissed my mouth." Fishman (Dear, Read) repeatedly invokes the Romantic radical poet Percy Bysshe Shelley as she seeks ideals, new beginnings, and pure sentiments in a sometimes frustrating Midwest: "One winter the road stuck us all in our houses/ turning to horses or daughters or fish." Titles such as "Eighth Month" and "Ninth Month" combine an interest in pregnancy and motherhood with attention to the agricultural year, at once inevitable and eccentric: "the woman tore a flower like a cabbage/ Often she was full of beets." Breathless, almost punctuation-free lines recall the W.S. Merwin of the 1970s, whose fans ought to love Fishman's work—yet Fishman is hopeful where Merwin was dark, delighted amid disorder. Originality and sincerity make up, in these bravura bursts of song, for what can look like disorganization, and even her many abandonments of syntax and sentence structure serve her emotions, describing her search for a better, unconventional way to live: "Don't be silly/ like a pillow full of atoms, where to lay your/ head with horses/ in the happiness." (May)

IN THE ARCHIVES
Christopher Arigo. Omnidawn (IPG, dist.), $14.95 paper (120p) ISBN 9781890650315

Arigo's ambitious sophomore effort merges a wartime political critique with cyberpunk attitudes and images and with exuberant typographical experiment. The merger—conducted in fast-paced, anxious lines and choppy rectangles of text—conjures up a set of scary claims about twenty-first century machines, grief, information and alienation. One of Arigo's seven sequences arranges narrow lines like ancient epitaphs, and (like ancient epitaphs) they invoke the dead: "Inhumation/ teeters end-of-tongue/ —better to bury/ that utterance/ than to speak it." Other sequences arrange their lists and invocations in narrow paragraphs printed sidewise across each page: a segment from "Tracking Sites III" imagines a time "before eras epochs and periods before zero before phosphenes obstruct sight before hormones release before clothes are shed." Such evocations of bodies and desires crop up throughout these uneasy pages, only to give way to bleaker visions of sabotage, robots, mass casualties, "sounds/ too unbearable to hear twice. Stolen refrains called history." Arigo (Lit Interim) may not sound subtle, and his modernist assemblages of fragments and phrases may not be, in their overall structure, so new. At the same time, though, his earnest and challenging lines of code and cryptic, half-technical phrasings try, sometimes brilliantly, to find a language fit both for desire and terror, for genuine affection in a matrix of wires and artificial hearts. (June)