Web-Exclusive Reviews: Week of 6/4/2007
-- Publishers Weekly, 6/4/2007
NONFICTION
BROTHERHOOD OF THE ROPE: The Biography of Charles Houston
Bernadette McDonald. Mountaineers, $24.95 (256p) ISBN 9781594850677
Charles Houston, author of mountaineering classic K2: The Savage Mountain and now in his nineties, was plagued with feelings of failure even as he excelled in a number of daunting roles: medical doctor, university professor, Peace Corps director and legendary mountain climber. This novel-like biography explores the complicated man behind the myth, from his privileged upbringing through almost a century of adventure and achievement. A man of big ideas and big ambitions, Houston began experimenting in 1946 with altitude chambers, developing the first method for inoculating against hypoxia, in order to conquer Everest. Ten years later he was building, in his garage, the first “crude designs” for the artificial heart. There are fascinating asides into Houston’s “bouillabaisse” of careers, including work for the U.S. Army, medical practices in Exeter and Aspen, and his reluctant stint as a Peace Corps director in India, an eventful tenure. Author and climber McDonald (I’ll Call You in Kathmandu) deepens Houston’s legacy by providing a view of his inner struggles with depression, revealing this larger-than-life figure in very human terms, making Houston a pleasure to spend time with; as one of hiss fellow climbers would say of Houston, years later, “his accomplishments are nothing compared the greatness of his soul.” (May)
THE CONVICTION OF RICHARD NIXON: The Untold Story of the Frost/Nixon Interviews
James Reston, Jr. Harmony Books, $22 (208p) ISBN 9780307394200
In 1977, three years after his resignation, Richard Nixon returned to the public eye in a series of interviews with British television journalist David Frost, for which Nixon received $1 million. Figuring his political and lawyerly skills were more than a match for Frost’s interrogation, Nixon instead found himself doing exactly what his successor Gerald Ford had tried to prevent with a Presidential pardon: publicly admitting that he had broken the law. Reston, Jr. was one of the aides Frost hired to help him plan his line of attack; this book, written at the time of the interviews, is being published for the first time now (Reston has supplied a foreword and afterword), but it hardly reads like history. Instead, watching the comeuppance of a highly unpopular and divisive president will provide gratifying thrills for the politically disenchanted. Some references may fly by a modern audience’s radar (“Ralph Abernathy pissing on the presidency”?), but Reston’s passion for finding the chinks in Nixon’s armor makes for fascinating reading. (June)
THE CURE FOR ANYTHING IS SALT WATER: How I Threw My Life Overboard and Found Happiness at Sea
Mary South. HarperCollins, $23.95 (224p) ISBN 9780060747022
A mid-life crisis and a latent sense of adventure caused book editor South to give up her life in publishing and take up residence on the Bossanova, a steel-hull trawler she bought before knowing how to captain it. The subtitle is largely hyperbolic—South’s time “at sea” was really a short, if perilous, sail from Florida to Sag Harbor, where the boat is now docked—but South makes an interesting memoir from her skillful observation of the sailing life: “Good seamanship isn’t the thoughtless instinct that salty dogs make it seem to be. It’s the good habit of always asking yourself the right questions in the right order and answering them thoughtfully.” Sometimes, she seems to have forgotten landlubbers might pick up her book; a sentences like, “One danger is that your bow will slow and your stern will get kicked out to the side, causing you to be beam-to,” is just one head-scratcher of many for the uninitiated. She can be clumsy when transitioning between sailing stories and other aspects of her life (“This [sailing] was happiness. For a time, happiness, too, had been Leslie.”), but her clear-eyed perspective and involving stories keep the narrative moving. This small but well-observed memoir is a worthwhile read for anyone stuck in the workaday rut. (June)
DAM NATION: Dispatches from the Water Underground
Edited by Cleo Woelfle-Erskine, July Oskar Cole and Laura Allen. Soft Skull, $19.95 paper (322p) ISBN 9781932360806
This essay anthology looks at water issues worldwide and throughout history, including science, history and investigative reporting, as well as personal stories and profiles. Among other concerns, writers collected here—mostly activists, but also sociologists, educators and reporters—address untreated sewage dumping and the disease outbreaks it causes; the destructive power of upstream dams; and the sediment-starved Mississippi Delta, its attendant erosion, and the horrific storm damage that’s resulted. A short, frank multi-millennial history of urban sewage disposal illustrates well the dangers of water supplies contaminated by sewage—cholera, typhus, typhoid, etc.—and is equally forthright about the problems with current municipal sewage treatment practices. The authors maintain a tongue-in-cheek style that, for the most part, keeps tedium at bay; if readers find Part One too polemical, Parts Two and Three offer principles and proper construction techniques for practical, at-home solutions, including home watergardens, home-scale greywater systems and composting toilets. (June)
DEVICES OF THE SOUL: Battling for Our Selves in the Age of Machines
Steve Talbott. O’Reilly, $22.99 (310p) ISBN 9780596526801
From the very first chapter, which presents a creative re-reading of Homer’s Odyssey, author and professor Talbott (In the Belly of the Beast) takes his elegant treatise on technology and humanity in some surprising, discipline-hopping directions. With one part Aristotelian rigor, one part transcendental humanism and a healthy dollop of indignation, Talbott examines the often troubling relationships among people, technology and society from a number of angles, including education, toys, ecological management, artificial intelligence, bioengineering and disability. Talbott’s thoughtful analysis gets readers thinking less about technology’s value than technology’s values—the principles it supports. Hanging in the balance, Talbot claims, is the fate of humanity: “a hellish, counter-human, machine-like society” or “a humane society in which the machine…reflects back to us our own inner powers.” Talbott is upfront about his biases and assumptions, giving him the freedom to steer his arguments into strange, sometimes contentious territory. His enormous range of literature references and responses keep things lively; combined with a dearth of technical details, Talbott’s work should find readers among non-specialists, but his fresh ideas are sure to intrigue techies of all kinds. (May)
THE HAUNTED OBSERVATORY: Curiosities from the Astronomer’s Cabinet
Richard Baum. Prometheus, $28 (290p) ISBN 9781591025122
In every field of scientific research, fitful progress is the norm, and comes only after numerous dead ends, backtrackings and wild goose chases that make up “the flotsam and jetsom of scientific advance”; Baum, a British astronomer and author (In Search of Planet Vulcan, with William Sheehan), has put together a fascinating collection of this outmoded ephemera in this alternate history of science, populated by the famous and the forgotten. Each chapter tackles a different story, for instance Herschel’s discovery of Uranus (an inspiration for many Enlightenment gentlemen) and the establishment of the first modern observatory, in 1781, by astronomer Johann Schroter in 1781 (a poignant story of discovery and war). Baum helps contemporary readers understand why observations were interpreted as they were, and how centuries-old records still have value today, but he doesn’t make it easy: his prose can be convoluted, and long passages describing observational data are difficult to follow. Still, for amateur and professional astronomers, and those interested in the history of science, the gems contained here are worth the effort. (June)
HIGH SOCIETY: How Substance Abuse Ravages America and What to Do About It
Joseph A. Califano, Jr. PublicAffairs, $26.95 (272p) ISBN 9781586483357
It’s hard to argue with Califano’s thesis, that substance abuse is a huge, expensive and often tragic problem in the U.S., particularly when it affects children; best known for declaring cigarettes “public health enemy number one” as Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, Califano is clearly passionate, well-meaning and unafraid to think big: “We must end our denial, stamp out the stigma, rethink our concept of crime and punishment…to confront this plague.” His sincerity and conviction is a two-edged sword, however: he comes off big-hearted one minute (“I am calling for…acceptance of such abuse and addiction as a chronic disease”), humorless and out of touch the next (“Movies like 40 Year Old Virgin and Wedding Crashers play excessive alcohol use for laughs”). And though he does take a chapter to address the “sharp edges” of marijuana use and warn against its (non-medical) legalization, he otherwise lumps all addictive substances into a single category; specificity goes instead into the details, costs and attendant statistics of (mostly failed) anti-abuse programs and legislation. Proposed solutions tend toward the general: more and better education, standardized professional training for therapists, eliminating tobacco and alcohol money from politics and “curbing availability and attractiveness.” As a wonky primer to one culture warrior’s approach to America’s drug problem, this volume is informative, if familiar. (May)
LINCOLN THE LAWYER
Brian Dirck. Univ. of Illinois, $29.95 (208p) ISBN 9780252031816
This meticulous study of Lincoln leaves aside his well-covered presidency to spotlight his rather pedestrian career as an Illinois lawyer. Lincoln spent roughly 25 years practicing law, and most studies of this period cast it in terms of his later accomplishments: “admirers have done what they can to inject a little excitement into his legal life.” Using the recently completed Lincoln Legal Papers Project, fourteen years of “unearthing every available primary source on Lincoln’s law practice,” history professor and author Dirck (Lincoln and Davis) applies the corrections, unearthing a more mundane, and more human, Lincoln. The vast majority of his nearly 4,000 cases were run-of-the-mill debt litigation, fairly standard for the growing credit economy. And although he had a few high-profile cases (murders, railroad lawsuits), Dirck’s technique is to show more about Lincoln through everyday details—the masculine squalor of his Springfield office, the rough-and-tumble camaraderie of the circuit courts, and the quiet exactitude of his paperwork—than more sensational (and largely apocryphal) stories. Historians, legal scholars and practicing lawyers will find a sophisticated, thoughtful treatment of Lincoln and 19th century law practice, but Dirck’s command of legal theory and straightforward prose make this book appropriate even for those without prior knowledge of the law or Lincoln’s life. (May)
THE MYTH OF THE RATIONAL VOTER: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies
Bryan Caplan. Princeton, $29.95 (280p) ISBN 9780691129426
Caplan, an associate professor of economics, believes that empirical proof of voter irrationality is the key to a realistic picture of democracy and, thus, how to approach and improve it. Focusing on how voters are systematically mistaken in their grasp of economics—according to Caplan, the No. 1 area of concern among voters in most election years—he effectively refutes the “miracle” of aggregation, showing that an uninformed populace will often vote against measures that benefit the majority. Drawing extensively from the Survey of Americans and Economists on the Economy, Caplan discusses how rational consumers often make irrational voters, why it’s in politicians’ interest to foment that irrationality, what economists make of the (non) existence of systematic bias and how social science’s “misguided insistence that every model be a ‘story without fools,’ ” has led them to miss the crucial questions in politics, “where folly is central.” Readers unfamiliar with economic theory and its attendant jargon may find themselves occasionally (but only momentarily) lost; otherwise the text is highly readable and Caplan’s arguments are impressively original, shedding new light on an age-old political economy conundrum. (June)
OFF-RAMPS AND ON-RAMPS: Keeping Talented Women on the Road to Success
Sylvia Ann Hewlett. Harvard Business, $29.95 ISBN 9781422101025
Despite advances in women’s rights, as well as telecommuting, job sharing and flex-work, the components of corporate advancement have been largely unchanged since the 1950s; according to author and economist Hewlett (Creating a Life), these outdated criteria are decidedly stacked against women: lock step progression, face time, unreasonable hours, flattery and obeisance, golf and strip clubs and male bonding. The 60 percent of women workers who take a career-path detour (“off-ramp”), typically for family reasons, are welcomed back with un- or underemployment. Meanwhile, traditional male incentives—money and power—don’t hold the same appeal for women, leading to substantial attrition rates among the business’s upper echelons. Although Hewlett is admirably thorough in her research of “off ramping” as a strategy for women, and provides plenty of real-world examples, she’s unconcerned with the larger implications for workers of either gender; though the female focus doesn’t detract, it may leave readers with some unanswered questions (why should any employee withstand what resembles fraternity hazing just to get ahead?). Nevertheless, Hewlett looks at all areas of a constrictive work environment and offers intelligent solutions for reaching one’s full potential within it. (May)
THE REAL ALL AMERICANS: The Team That Changed a Game, a People, a Nation
Sally Jenkins. Doubleday, $24.95 (352p) ISBN 9780385519878
In this sprawling, heavily researched sports tale, author and Washington Post reporter Jenkins (It’s Not About the Bike, with Lance Armstrong) covers more than a half-century—from mid-19th century battles between the U.S. Army and Native Americans to the 1918 closing of Pennsylvania’s seminal Carlisle Indian Industrial School—telling the long-buried story of Carlisle’s football team (the Indians, natch), which defied tradition and arguably did more to shape the modern collegiate game than any of its Ivy League competitors. Founded in 1879 by Army Lt. Col. Richard Pratt, an abolitionist who believed Native Americans deserved a visible place in U.S. society, Carlisle introduced fans and opponents to shoulder pads, the forward pass and the reverse option. Led by renowned coach Glenn “Pop” Warner and player Jim Thorpe, regarded as one of the greatest athletes America has produced, the Indians’ struggles, especially with racial and political bigotry, prove surprisingly prescient (think Don Imus). That said, Jenkins shoehorns so much peripheral history that football often takes a back seat; in addition, her detached narration gives the book a term-paper feel, made all the more obvious by the enthusiasm and pride she details in her subjects. (May)
LIFESTYLE
FOOD & WINE ANNUAL COOKBOOK 2007: An Entire Year of Recipes
Editors of Food & Wine. Food & Wine (Sterling, dist.), $29.95 (408p) ISBN 9781932624182
Among a crowded field, Food and Wine’s annual cookbook is too perennial to stand out and too general to squeeze into any one niche; it is also, year in and year out, one of the best additions to any adventurous chef’s kitchen. Featuring new takes on old favorites—a delicious Sweet Potato Souffle, for instance, enriched with a handful of gruyere—alongside exciting adventures in dining, like Patio Pig Pickin’, an afternoon-long ham roast that serves 18. In between are international specialties like French celebrity chef Eric Ripert’s Brazilian Feijoada, a rib-sticking mix of beans, sausage, and various cuts of pork, like a South American take on the French cassoulet. Other neat tricks include Beef Tenderloin “Dogs” with Corn Relish, featuring marinated slices of tenderloin wedged into crusty slices of baguette, and Shrimp Masala, which mixes big fresh shrimp with a panoply of Indian spices. Desserts are a high point: a Graham Cracker Pound Cake is simple but irresistible, as are Spiced Almond Tuiles, and anyone who sees the full-page glamour shot of the Chocolate Cookies-N-Cream Tower will race to the grocery store for bittersweet chocolate and heavy cream. (June)
LOVE, MOMMY: Writing Love Letters to Your Baby
Judy Siblin-Librach. ECW, $12.95 (130p) ISBN 9781550227581
Journalist and life coach Siblin-Librach (The Toronto Wedding Handbook) presents this guidebook, suitable for anyone with a new baby in their life (but especially mom), to crafting heartfelt love letters to infants designed to preserve and give back “a piece of their memory they otherwise wouldn’t have access to.” With patience, much encouragement and numerous examples from her own letter collection, Siblin-Librach leads non-writers through the letter-writing process, providing “Magic Keys” to use as jumping-off points, suggestions for topics common to the child-rearing experience (shopping for maternity clothes, baby’s first bath, the bedtime routine) and tips on technique (starting small, using humor, making regular appointments to write). Though reading it straight through may prove terminally repetitive, this slim volume makes a fine resource for parents looking to make a very personal record of their child’s early years. (May)
MORE HOT SEX: How to do it Longer, Better, and Hotter than Ever
Tracey Cox. Bantam $15 paper (320p) ISBN 9780553383942
Cox, author of a number of popular sex and relationship guides, follows up her 1999 Hot Sex with this helpful collection of further tips and insights. Continuing to stress the importance of communication between partners, Cox distinguishes her work with an impressive range of topics, as well as careful attention to the emotional and intellectual aspects of sex. With a friendly, funny, conversational tone, Cox provides the requisite sex tips as well as advice on increasing attractiveness, consolation for late bloomers and detailed instructions on becoming a better kisser (an oft-overlooked instructional). She also offers her take on controversial topics like interoffice dating (why not?), and disproves common wisdom such as the assumption that men have stronger sex drives than women; she also disproves the adage that there’s nothing new under the sun with three new female spots, besides the G, ripe for stimulation. Most topics are addressed from both a male and female point of view, letting readers in on the other team’s viewpoint; her only misstep is a chapter on homosexuality and bisexuality aimed more at curious heteros than practicing gays and lesbians. Otherwise, this solid sex resource holds plenty of answers, both to frequently asked questions and the ones you’re afraid to ask. (June)
ILLUSTRATED
RUDOLF STINGEL
Edited by Francesco Bonami. Yale Univ./Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, $55 (246p) ISBN 9780300124248
Designed to coincide with a career retrospective first shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, this book collects the work that has certified painter and conceptual artist Rudolf Stingel as a groundbreaker, someone as concerned with exploring the process of painting as he is the act itself. Employing materials such as Styrofoam, carpet or rubber, in addition to oil and enamel, his works are often iconoclastic image; the book sparse text allows the images to speak largely for themselves, and what they say can be difficult to decipher. Three essays in the front shed some light: Whitney curator Chrissie Iles discusses Stingel’s influences, motivations and materials, “what Yve-Alain Bois describes as internalizing…the very technology threatening painting.” Editor Bonami contributes an essay that illumines the context of Stingel’s work, but gets lofty and vague at times, as in Stingel’s “understanding that painting carries energy and consumes it, and abstraction happens when the power goes off momentarily.” Reiner Zettl explores the texture and meaning of installation pieces, like Stingel carpeting the lobby of Grand Central Station in 2004. Beautifully produced, the images that make up the better part of the volume are lavishly spaced, a succesful effort at replicating the museum experience. 102 color illustrations. (May)
FICTION
THE BABY LOTTERY
Kathryn Trueblood. Permanent Press, $28 (248p) ISBN 9781579621513
Despite its whimsical title, the tone of Trueblood’s debut novel is anything but lighthearted. Rapidly approaching 40, five college friends find their bonds sorely tested when Charlotte, an alcoholic, opts for an abortion rather than facing the wrath of her happily child-free husband. Jean, a former social worker whose infertility has resulted in the end of her marriage, offers to adopt, to no avail. As the reactions of all are registered in turn (including proudly single Tasi), there are revelations of past abortions. But Charlotte is a cipher, as are the secondary male characters. And when OB nurse Nan, a married mother of two, reflects on women’s reproductive history, or when Virginia muses at length about the difficulties of being a mother-writer, the book borders on Women’s Studies 101. (July)
THE CONJURE BOOK
A.A. Attanasio. Prime (www.prime-books.com), $12.95 paper (224p) ISBN 9780809557738
Nancy Drew meets a do-it-yourself Harriet Potter in this disappointing YA coming-of-witchery-age tale from Attanasio (The Eagle and the Sword). One day, spunky 13-year-old motherless spelunker Jane Riggs, newly installed by her widowed geologist father in Bosky Glen, Mrs. Babcock’s historic Massachusetts house near the wild countryside, rappels herself into an under-the-knoll witch’s kitchen and finds the 400-year-old grimoire, a Wiccan training manual, of Hyssop Joan, a white witch Puritan villagers had tormented into going black. With digital appearances of Hyssop Joan via Jane’s laptop and of Joan’s familiar, Jeoffry, now using the body of Mrs. Bab-cock’s white Manx cat, Jane sets off to contact her dead mother and defeat Trick E, an evil spirit fox who hates all environment-destroying humanity. Attansio’s hamfisted attempts to shape each character’s speech to his or her personality result in mangled syntax and abortive metaphors, while even less digestible chunks of pop psychology clog a derivative and pedestrian story line. (June)
THE CURE
Varley O’Connor. Bellevue Literary (Consortium, dist.), $25 (256p) ISBN 9781934137031
Bellevue Literary Review’s new trade book list releases its first title, the third novel by O’Connor (A Company of Three). This observant saga centers on the affluent Hatherford family in 1940s Bergen County, New Jersey. A WWI vet, Vern operates a thriving Ford dealership. His wife Maeve, though glamorous, seeks constant attention for her polio-like symptoms. Her son Scott also suffers from a crippling case of polio, and his friend Julian is perhaps too caring—a problem complicated when Scott’s kid sister Patsy witnesses one of the boys’ more intimate moments. Dr. Mat Wayne plays family doctor, godparent and therapist to the dysfunctional Hatherfords and falls hard for Maeve. World War Two looms in the background. Rich details about polio and its treatment lend sympathy to characters prone to adultery, wife-beating and drinking. Despite their flaws, the Hatherfords manage to carry on with a gutsy spirit. (May)
THE DOCTOR’S DAUGHTER
Donna MacQuigg. Five Star, $26.95 (264p) ISBN 9781594145964
MacQuigg (The Price of Pride) returns to nineteenth-century Santa Fe for a second western romance. Rebeccah Randolph’s mother requests on her deathbed that Rebeccah leave her aristocratic English life for a year in New Mexico with her estranged father, a frontier doctor. Though already betrothed and convinced that Americans are ruffians, Rebeccah reluctantly consents. When her stagecoach is ambushed, she is rescued by a handsome cavalry officer, Sayer MacLaren. She spends months, and chapters, denying the attraction. Her engagement aside, the biggest obstacle is MacLaren’s “‘fearsome reputation for Indian fighting’”—Rebeccah objects to killing, even in self-defense. Just when she’s about to acknowledge her feelings, her Grandmama, matriarch and bully, arrives with Rebeccah’s fiancé to complicate matters. Colonel MacLaren is also busy chasing a band of Indian robbers—a subplot that adds some mystery to an otherwise chaste romance. (May)
HOOK, LINE, AND HOMICIDE: A Paul Turner Mystery
Mark Richard Zubro. St. Martin’s Minotaur, $25.95 (272p) ISBN 9780312333034
In Zubro’s entertaining if uneven ninth Paul Turner mystery (after 2005’s Nerds Who Kill), murder rudely interrupts the Chicago police detective’s annual fishing trek to Canada. Turner has rented two houseboats on Lake of the Woods with his two sons; his lover, Ben; and the family of his detective partner, Buck Fenwick. Though longtime summer visitors, the Chicagoans soon become targets of antigay harassment. When they report a fight between bully Scarth Krohn’s gang and First Nation (Canadian Indian) kids, the local police chief sides with the bullies. Threats and intimidation escalate until Krohn is found floating dead in the lake. When the corrupt police chief arrests a First Nation’s teen who had been Krohn’s enemy, the detectives reluctantly hang up their rods and start investigating. While series fans will enjoy seeing old friends in action, others may be irritated by excessive dialogue that slows the narrative, particularly in the middle. (June)
PORTABLE CHILDHOODS
Ellen Klages. Tachyon (www.tachyonpublications.com), $14.95 paper (248p) ISBN 9781892391452
Klages, whose debut novel, Green Glass Sea (2006), won the Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction, demonstrates both superior writing skill and a wide range in an impressive short story collection that defies easy categorization. The 16 selections, three of which are original to the volume, include moving mainstream tales of human relationships, like the title story, about a mother and daughter, as well as fantasy and science fiction. The author is equally adept at short, twisty narratives that make the most of premises that could be gimmicks in lesser hands, like the recursive “Möbius, Stripped of a Muse.” This collection will linger in the memory long after read-ing, and should help garner a larger audience for Klages’s forthcoming second novel. (May)
WISH CLUB
Kim Strickland. Three Rivers, $13.95 paper (336p) ISBN 9780307352828
The five middle-aged Chicago women of Strickland’s debut turn their book club turns into a monthly spellcasting session that seems harmless at first.But as the “wishes” get more involved—Claudia desperately wants a baby; Lindsay believes that losing weight will help her become influential with her socialite friends; Jill hesitantly asks for the perfect man; Gail would like some free time away from her three kids; Mara wants financial freedom—things go awry. Strickland, who pilots a Boeing 767 for a living, gives her five passengers a naivety of witchcraft and strength of character that charms. (June)
