Web Exclusive Reviews: Week of 3/31/2008
-- Publishers Weekly, 3/31/2008
Web-Exclusive Reviews
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NONFICTION
The Craftsman
Richard Sennett. Yale, $27.50 (336p) ISBN 9780300119091
With this volume, author and sociologist Sennett (The Culture of the New Capitalism) launches a three-book examination of “material culture,” asking “what the process of making concrete things reveals to us about ourselves.” Taking in everything from Pandora and Hephaestus to Linux programmers, Sennett posits that the spirit of craftsmanship—an “enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake”—is tragically lacking in many areas of the industrialized world. Craftsmanship, by combining skill, commitment and judgment, establishes a close relationship between head and hand, man and machine, that Sennett asserts is vital to physical, mental and societal well-being; the symptoms of craftsmanship-deficiency can be found in worker demoralization, inefficiency and waning loyalty from both employees and employers, as well as other (largely institutional) effects. Sennett looks at the evolution of craftsmanship and the historical forces which have stultified it, how it’s learned in the areas it still thrives (among scientists, artists, cooks, computer programmers and others), and issues of quality and ability (skill, not talent, makes a craftsman). Sennett’s learned but inclusive prose proves entirely readable, and the breadth of his curiosity—delving into the minds behind the Manhattan project, touring Soviet suburbs, examining the methods of Julia Childs—take him in a number of fascinating directions. (Mar.)
Natural Acts: A Sidelong View of Science and NatureDavid Quammen. Norton, $24.95 (272p) ISBN 9780393058055
Quammen’s writing style is so delightful that his content could almost be secondary. Happily, the author (most recently of The Reluctant Mr. Darwin) and his subjects are equally engaging: from a light-hearted trope on crows, whom he surmises are “too intelligent for their station in life”; to the dead-serious issue of human cloning, which he labels “perniciously stupid”; to a harrowing 453-day adventure in a remote Congolese forest Quammen shared with explorer J. Michael Fay. A revised and expanded version of the out-of-print 1985 original, this volume reprints a number of Quammen’s columns from Outside magazine along with more lengthy articles culled from sources like Audubon, National Geographic and Smithsonian, including a solid selection of his post-1985 work. In his introduction he describes the new version as “a chimerical creature, like a griffin, bird-shaped in front with a mammalian caboose,” but his topics—and his tone—aren’t always so whimsical; in “Planet of Weeds,” a 1998 piece published in Harper’s, he predicts man-made ecological catastrophe: “Homo sapiens itself is the consummate weed.” A book to ponder and enjoy. (Mar.)
So You Think You can be President?: 200 Questions to Determine if You are Right (or Left) Enough to be the Next Commander-in-Chief
Iris Burnett and Clay Greager. Skyhorse, $12.95 paper (240p) ISBN 9781602392021
During times of war or economic recession, and especially around election years, the thought on millions of American’s minds is “I could be president.” Former presidential advisor Burnett and author Greager (a two-tour Vietnam vet) put these Americans to the test, literally, with 200 (actually 201) queries designed to gauge readers’ level of POTUS-worthiness. With tongues firmly in cheeks, Burnett and Greager interrogate readers about the issues—eventually—but not before getting into the most pressing matters: “Incredibly Personal History,” “Family Surprises” and “Who’s Got the Big Bucks?” In addition to true/false, multiple choice and short-answer questions (thankfully, there’s no essay portion), Burnett and Greager supply POTUS Training Exercises and an extensive, chuckle-worthy glossary: “Politics: Is synonymous with infomercial… The art of making people, who have no clue what you are talking about, become believers.” Balancing sarcasm and criticism with a bipartisan spirit (or, more accurately, a plague-on-both-your-houses spirit), Bennett and Greager provide a stinging perspective on what we’ve come to expect of our presidents (and their underlings). Presidential hopefuls and armchair pundits alike should enjoy this satirical self-evaluation, and are sure to find lines worth tossing around at the next campaign event. 25 b/w illustrations. (Mar.)
“Strong Medicine” Speaks: A Native American Elder has Her Say: An Oral History
Amy Hill Hearth. Atria, $23 (288p) ISBN 9780743297790
Hearth, best known for her oral history of the Delaney sisters Having Our Say, captures the voice of 83-year-old tribe matriarch Marion “Strong Medicine” Gould as she looks back on her life as a Lani Lenape Indian. A once- powerful tribe ranging across New Jersey and parts of New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware, the arrival of Europeans would eventually turn the Lenape into “a hidden people”: says Gould, “We kept quiet in order to survive.” With great care, Gould describes the challenges of 20th and 21st century Native Americans and her significant role in her southern New Jersey tribe’s transforming way of life. In many ways, Native Americans’ modern struggle is for a public identity, especially apparent during the civil rights movement: “[A]ll of a sudden, we aren’t dark enough…. Indian was not black. We were totally left out in the cold.” Gould locates the source of her strength and the tribe’s—the Indian way—in the extended family, and suggests that many people’s problems today stem from a lack of “kinfolk to lean on.” Poignant moments of love and loss bookend the tale, and in between Hearth works almost invisibly to craft a graceful, sustained look into the quiet struggles of contemporary Native Americans. (Mar.)
We Shall Overcome: A History of Civil Rights and the Law
Alexander Tsesis. Yale Univ., $35 (384p) ISBN 9780300118377
Tsesis, a professor of law and author of The Thirteenth Amendment and American Freedom, offers an ambitious history of how the Supreme Court, presidential orders, and state and federal legislative bodies have affected the ability of minorities to secure their civil rights. As the history unfolds readers will find it hard not feel outrage at the shameful complicity of the Supreme Court, who, following the Civil War, chose to interpret the Constitution and Civil Rights Amendments in a literalist way, allowing the southern states to continue to disenfranchise African-Americans. But this history also includes the progress, however imperfect, made in securing civil rights since WWII, when African-Americans returning from the war and women on the home front would no longer tolerate the endemic pre-war racism and sexism. Tsesis is effective at describing the infrastructure of that progress, foremost the passage of 1960s Civil Rights legislation that ensured voting rights and prohibited discrimination in housing and employment. The author also covers the women’s suffrage movement, examines the interment of Japanese Americans during WWII, and considers the growth of legal protections of private consensual sexual conduct. As Tsesis shows, the battle for civil rights in America is one whose history is filled with abuses as well as, in the last fifty years, genuine progress. (Apr.)
| Talking Back to Prozac |
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LIFESTYLE
The American Beach Cookbook
Marsha Dean Phelts. Univ. Press of Fla., $19.95 paper (320p) ISBN 9780813032108
African-American resort community American Beach, located on Amelie Island just north of Jacksonville, Fla., was founded in 1935 during the height of segregation, and quickly became “a Mecca described as a ‘Negro Ocean Playground.’” Longtime resident and local historian Phelts gives readers a warm and colorful overview of the region in this compilation of nearly 300 down-home dishes. Opening her recipe box and those of her friends, Phelts shares classics like homemade fudge and fried chicken, as well as southern staples like crab boils, she-crab soup and collard greens, along with personal stories and local anecdotes. As one might expect, seafood figures prominently. Phelts offers a bevy of recipes for shrimp—dips, pickles, sandwiches and even potato salad—as well as regional favorites like conch chowder and the Fishwich, a fish cake of sorts composed of whitefish, salmon and grouper. Rounded out with a solid helping of sides and desserts (Bourbon Pecan Cake and Key Lime Pie among them), Phelts’ culinary scrapbook is a delightful slice of Americana. (Apr.)
The Flight from Intimacy: Healing Your Relationship of Counter-Dependency—the Other Side of Co-Dependency
Janae B. Weinhold and Barry K. Weinhold. New World Library, $14.95 paper (256p) ISBN 9781577316053
In 1987, Melody Beattie introduced codependence to the masses with her bestseller Codependent No More. The Weinholds, husband-and-wife psychologists and cofounders of the Carolina Institute for Conflict Resolution & Creative Leadership, weighed in with 1999’s Breaking Free of the Co-Dependency Trap (recently republished by NWL); here, they look at counter-dependence, the little-discussed, hard-to-pin-down yin to co-dependency’s yang. Counter-dependency is characterized by controlling and self-centered behavior: where co-dependents cling to others, counter-dependents push them away; where co-dependents have low self esteem, counter-dependents have “falsely inflated self-esteem”; co-dependents are people-pleasers, whereas counter-dependents are people controllers. The results are “loneliness, alienation and a sense of ‘quiet desperation.’” The Weinholds do a clear and thorough job discussing and dissecting counter-dependency as a key factor behind failed relationships, and also make a case for its role in high profile church scandals, post-traumatic stress disorder in returning soldiers and even the collapse of the housing market. Packed with information taken from the Weinholds’ 23 years of research and counseling, this isn’t a light read, but case studies, charts and exercises, along with practical tips, keep things moving. While the notion that unresolved childhood issues continue to play out in adult relationships is nothing new, the Weinholds’ insight and emphasis on self-sufficiency should help readers break free from dysfunctional behavioral patterns. (Mar.)
The Only 127 Things You Need: A Guide to Life’s Essentials
Donna Wilkinson. Tarcher, $14.95 paper (400p) ISBN 9781585426225
This is a perky little book with a mighty goal: to instruct readers on the essential elements of a good life. Divided into three digestible sections—Healthy Body, Healthy Mind and Healthy Spirit—it’s chock full of useful if familiar tips, such as embracing the (older, Harvard School of Public Health-designed) Healthy Eating Pyramid and including “never less than five” vegetable servings daily; keeping the nap short and getting a good night’s sleep (“Essentials for Optimum Snoozing” include “A dark, cool, quiet room,” a “reasonably early dinner” and a regular schedule); as well as volunteering, reflecting and preserving one’s “sense of awe and wonder.” But the book also introduces handy advice from some well-heeled experts, including Harper’s Bazaar editor-in-chief Glenda Bailey and fashion designers Nicole Miller and Dana Buchman in the clothing section. Happily, the book is not just an endless list of “to dos” or “to haves”; there are also many “whys” (as in “why we need regular exercise”) and “hows” (as is in “how to buy great sheets”). Cynics might argue that you’ll need more than Wilkinson’s 127 essentials in a life, but it’s hard to argue that she hasn’t made a good start. (Mar.)
The Organic Garden: Green Gardening for a Healthy Planet
Allan Shepherd. Collins U.K. (IPG, dist.), $24.95 (256p) ISBN 9780007241422
Shepherd takes the notion of organic gardening to a new level with this poetic guide that “treats gardening as the starting point for a whole organic lifestyle.” With a holistic attitude reminiscent of the back-to-the-land hippie days, Shepherd begins with the premise that farmer’s markets, community gardens and organic gardening are thriving because “people have rediscovered what it’s like to be part of something.” At turns whimsical and practical, he writes, “I enter my garden and immediately want to slow down to the pace of a snail.” In this leisurely spirit, the first part delves mainly into atmospheric and social considerations (benches, hedges, fences and sheds) and how to achieve them sustainably. Only then does it address the more traditional gardening topics of microclimate, soil, planting and pests. Shepherd’s 10 principles of organic gardening—“create space,” “soil is everything,” “make a social space,” among them—provide underpinnings for the overlapping themes of the book, which, although light on the step-by-step instructions novices might expect, provides something less tangible but perhaps more important: a vivid taste of why gardeners love to garden. (Apr.)
The Perfect Recipe for Losing Weight And Eating Great
Pam Anderson. Houghton Mifflin, $27 (304p) ISBN 9780618835966
Anderson, not to be confused with actress-model Pamela, continues her Perfect Recipe series (The Perfect Recipe, Perfect Recipes for Having People Over) with a voluminous assortment of healthy, tasty recipes. Though at times overly verbose, Anderson’s approach to crafting meals is smart and accessible, especially for newcomers intimidated by cooking. Once cooks have mastered basic recipes for soups, omelets, cookies or creamy pasta (“Alfredo sauce for everyone”), Anderson provides a myriad of simple but delicious variations to stave off boredom, build confidence and develop discipline. However, she’s hardly a culinary taskmaster: dieters are encouraged to snack on healthy treats like Lemon Pistachio Cookies or a glass of wine and a handful of Roasted Pumpkin Seeds with Chili and Lime. Dessert lovers are rewarded with a creamy cheesecake and a riff on decadent crème brulee that employs evaporated milk in lieu of cream to diminish the caloric blow. Those who’ve tried fad diets and failed due to taste bud fatigue, intimidating recipes or hard-to-source ingredients will find Anderson’s resourceful, imaginative compilation a welcome relief. (Mar.)
POETRY
Earthly
Erica Funkhouser. Houghton Mifflin, $22 (80p) ISBN 9780618933426
Funkhouser’s fifth effort comes as an unexpected, and an unusually subtle, delight: at a time when most poets flaunt their strongest emotions, their strangest language, or their command of forms, Funkhouser instead shares the virtues of talented essayists (John McPhee, for example), recording and remembering the people and things she discovers in the outside world. The short poems at the front of her book take in topics as various as the history of New York’s Frick Collection of Art, the origin of granite (“liquid magma and the original ice”), and the seasonal details of life on a farm. The sonnets with which she concludes depict Cezanne’s preferred shades of blue, the death of a favorite horse, and the author’s teen years, when “We read John Donne while smoking Panama Red.” The most memorable parts, though, come in the middle of the volume: there Funkhouser (The Actual World) gives a whole sequence to the American apple, from the journeys of Johnny Appleseed (who “donated fruit and sapling,” to wagon-train pioneers, “the thought of a draft of his own cider/ in five years enlivening the driver”) to the varietals of her own Massachusetts and the soil of her seaside town, “on the edge of this abrupt continent of mud.” Despite a deft pair of pantouns and the rhyme in her sonnets, Funkhouser may not stand out as a virtuouso of form, nor do her poems try to do so. Instead, she asks—and deserves (more so than before)—attention as a poet of observation, one who looks steadily, patiently, and respectfully at the things, both built and natural, of this world. (Mar.)
Old War
Alan Shapiro. Houghton Mifflin, $22 (96p) ISBN 9780618452439
With its many characters, forms and storylines and its repeated looks at death and old age, this tenth outing from the widely-respected Shapiro (Mixed Company) could be both the saddest, and the most various, of his works. The poet opens with meticulous stanzas about transience and loss, from the newsworthy casualties of suicide bombs to the passing shadows in bedrooms and trains. He concludes with marvelously inventive poems about male professions and types, each with his own form of sin and pain—a “Country-Western Singer” whose rough rhymes describe an alcoholic’s arc, a dying political fixer (“Handler”) whose Southern-fried diction belies his Tolstoyan regret. In between come lyric poems of autobiography, in blank verse and in clipped short lines. In one pathos-filled page of prose, new amours and familial affections coexist with repeated mourning—for his late sister and brother and for the diminished capacities of his ailing parents, who have moved in with him. Shapiro writes well of athletes’ achievements, of his own day-to-day choices, of pride and hope. He sounds most at home, though, with disappointment, resignation and grief, as in “Last Wedding Attended by the Gods”: “Love was/ the sensation/ of the promise of// more love to come,” he writes there: “Nothing ever/ changed/ until it did.” (Mar.)
Wayfare
Pattiann Rogers. Penguin, $18 paper (128p) ISBN 9780143113348
Rogers (Firekeeper) rightly has a national reputation as an exuberant poet of nature and of the natural sciences, and this thirteenth outing praises, among others, the single-celled animals that survive in “sulfuric/ boiling black sea bottoms” or “held on under ten tons of polar ice,” “the bristlecone pine,” “field grasses/ in the wind,” and “the cadence of the lynx/ tracking through snow.” The Colorado-based Rogers sets these marvels of biology beside equally evocative lines on geology (“for any bold, black, sharp-edged/ chaos of broken rock, for pilings and high/ cracking boulders”) and then places all these sights beside another interest in astronomy: the nearly religious poems at the close of the book ask whether the patterns on our planet correspond to designs in the cosmos beyond. Before all these poems of sustained interest in science, Rogers places sequences about classical music and the visual arts, whose ornate pleasures may, or may not, console the people who make them: “The Sun in the Home for Retired Musicians” enters through a “stained-glass window” where “an aging maestro nods, humming/ a line of lavender against gold.” Where another writer might ask whether the sciences can speak to arts, Rogers nearly takes their consonance for granted: she tries instead to align the profusion of beauty she sees outside herself, from the symphony hall to the mountaintop, with the clarity (even the plainness) she seeks in the construction of her own poems. Rogers’ lists of descriptions, her alternations of rapture and catalogued fact, tend to reuse, even to repeat, the same few forms; the trees, mammals and protozoa in them, though, still seem worthy of wonder each time. (Apr.)
The Warrior: A Mother’s Story of a Son at War
Franches Richey. Viking, $21.95 (96p) ISBN 9780670019618
Richey’s son went from West Point to the Green Berets and thence to the war in Iraq. Her poems about him have appeared both in literary quarterlies and in O: The Oprah Magazine; this consistently moving, straightforward collection of those poems seems likely to gain much attention. Richey (The Burning Point) remembers her earlier years as a single mother, living through a traumatic miscarriage, juggling work and home life, and later grappling with her son’s military vocation: “My son has brothers now,” she writes, “the family she wanted.” Richey’s strongest lines, however, find a sharp blend between personal emotions and public events: she writes a poem to her son’s helmet, to his gun, to his “desert camo boots,” warning herself, “I can’t protect him.” Richey, who comes from West Virginia but lives in New York, sees signs of the current conflict everywhere—at the planetarium, for example, or in a taxicab. More than just a book about one war, Richey’s collection becomes instead a book about what military service (especially high-risk combat service, such as her son’s) does to the psyches and daily lives of those who serve and those who love them. In a museum exhibit about the Civil War, Richey grows “sick to my stomach,/ face-to-face with the gallantry/ of men young/ as my son”; hearing that son, home on leave, boast about his regiment’s destructive powers, she muses with self-conscious helplessness, “If I could take that hat off his head,/ he wouldn’t say those things.” (Apr.)
FICTION
Anathema
Colleen Coble. Thomas Nelson, $22.99 (336p) ISBN 9781595542472
Although Coble, a veteran novelist of inspirational romantic suspense, has not tried her hand at Amish-themed fiction, the Amish setting is the most compelling aspect of this disappointing suspense novel. Not only does Coble lace the story with the kinds of details that fans of Beverly Lewis and Wanda Brunstetter will love, she sets the novel in a northern Indiana Amish sect with some unique quirks not seen in Lancaster County-based fiction. The plot, however, is predictable—Hannah, a young Amish woman, leaves the community for love with an Englischer but finds the outside world fraught with menaces and trials. Dangers lurk back at home, too, where various members of Hannah’s Amish family turn up dead. This book doesn’t showcase Coble’s usual daft hand with suspense: several attempts on Hannah’s life arise, play out, and are dispatched with in as few as ten sentences each, scarcely permitting readers to believe that real danger is afoot. Although the story has a first-rate setting and some thoughtful musings on Christian forgiveness, the plot is often hackneyed, the scene changes abrupt, and some of the characters—including a stock-villain abusive husband—one-dimensional. (May)
The EndSalvatore Scibona. Graywolf, $24 (320p) ISBN 9781555974985
The Italian immigrants in this exceptional debut collide and collapse in a polyphonic narrative that is part novel, part epic prose poem spanning the first half of the 20th century. Costanza Marini, a Cleveland widow who performs abortions of such a high grade that clinicians come take stock of her methods, has decided, among other aspirations, to save Lina, her young seamstress protégée and heiress, from spinsterhood. Intersecting sporadically with the machinations of Mrs. Marini during the sweltering feast of the Assumption is Rocco, the baker of the Italian community of Elephant Park, who is poised to leave his parochial Midwestern enclave for the first time to seek out his lost family. In doing so, he must face America and eventually ends up adrift near the Canadian border while looking for “the New Jersey.” Rocco, whose fate, regrettably, is never explicated, inhabits (and narrates) the novel’s radiant beginning and is emblematic of both Scibona’s calibrated precision and the story’s potent humanity. This ravenous prose offers its share of challenges, but Scibona’s portrayal of the lost world of Elephant Park is a literary tour de force. (May)
In a Dark Season
Vicki Lane. Dell, $6.99 (448p) ISBN 9780440243601
North Carolina amateur sleuth Elizabeth Goodweather, 54, returns after Old Wounds uneasy about her relationship with Phillip, a former cop and the best friend of her deceased husband. First on her agenda: facing the attempted suicide of her friend Nola, ten years her senior. As Nola becomes increasingly unresponsive during her recovery, Elizabeth remains convinced that someone may be deliberately harming Nola in order to precipitate the sale of Nola’s homestead on Gudger’s Stand, a property steeped with secrets of the past. Lane craftily deepens the swiftly-moving plot with liberal sprinklings of Carolina folklore. (May)
Trophies
Heather Thomas. Morrow, $24.95 (528p) ISBN 9780061126246
Actress and screenwriter Thomas’s first novel lifts the veil on the already well-exposed world of Hollywood trophy wives. Each of these wives has found wealth through marriage: Marion Zane, the new money socialite and group’s queen bee; Lyndy Montgomery Wallert, the fading old guard; Patti Fink, the octogenarian-marrying gold digger; Pepper Papadopoulos, the Southern belle turned Greek heiress; Maya Hanson, the supermodel and Page Six staple; and Claire Price, the small town ingénue. The women are both friends and each other’s competition, but their beautifully coiffed exteriors are deceiving. Lyndy finds her family name no longer carries the same weight. Patti leaves her husband asleep each night and goes in search of sexual satisfaction. Pepper humiliates her husband with her superior business sense. Maya must weigh her movie-star husband’s desire for a family with her modeling career. Claire’s new life isn’t living up to the “Secret Rainbow Princess Promise” she made herself back home in Winamac, Ind. And after Marion discovers her husband cheated on her, her cushy lifestyle disintegrates and she must reshape her universe using only her Black Book, and her fight to reclaim her spot atop the social ladder calls into question who the real moguls are: the husbands or their wives? (Apr.)
