Web Exclusive Reviews: Week of 4/14/2008
-- Publishers Weekly, 4/14/2008
NONFICTION| Web Pick of the Week |
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Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon—And the Journey of a GenerationNONFICTION
Are You There Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea
Chelsea Handler. Simon Spotlight Entertainment $24.95 (272p) ISBN 9781416954125
At the age of nine, comedian Handler (host of her own cable talk show, Chelsea Lately) was already making up stories about all-night contract negations with Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell to get out of English assignments—but then, what would one expect from a girl told by her parents, a week before her fourth birthday, to plan her own party? This funny, whip-smart memoir, the follow-up her sex-centric essay collection My Horizontal Life, chronicles Handler’s ridiculous, gamboling life thus far, from her elementary school days—hounded by older girls for being less than wealthy, stuck at 12 babysitting an unruly 14-year-old with a wicked sugar addiction—to her sexually hyperactive, cocktail-swilling grown-up years. Handler’s hard-headed sense of humor and maniacal wit get her through a number of difficult situations, including incarceration for a DUI, threatening to beat up a snotty teenager, and facing a breakup with one man while hiding another under her bed. But Handler also demonstrates an attuned sense of self and a keen eye for those around her that occasionally elevate her musings from mere hilarity to genuine poignancy—but not to worry, the only tears readers will shed are from laughter. (Apr.)
Disappearing Destinations: 37 Places in Peril and What Can Be Done To Help Save Them
Kimberly Lisagor and Heather Hansen. Vintage, $15.95 paper (400p) ISBN 9780307277367
Written with care by Lisagor and Hansen, both wilderness and travel journalists, this ecologically-minded travelogue takes readers to a gaggle of stunning but delicate spots around the globe selected “because they are either unique and threatened or emblematic of… similar struggles” in multiple locations. Beginning with the Appalachians of West Virginia, a landscape mangled by mountain-top removal coal mining, each site gets a close look, including its history, ecology, geography, a detailed analysis of its vulnerabilities, and often one or two voices from it. Other destinations include the Danube River delta, Venice, the Great Barrier Reef and the Yangtze River Valley in China, now lost beneath the world’s largest hydropower project (the Three Gorges Dam, five times longer than the Hoover). Though it’s not meant to be a complete catalog, some spots seem (much) less significant than others—the vineyards in Napa Valley, say—and there’s some easy-to-spot omissions (the only archaeological site discussed is Macchu Picchu). As a broad survey of the kinds of treasures being lost to pressures of climate change, resource extraction, modernization and development, and just-too-many people, this is a useful resource for understanding the dizzying pace of worldwide environmental degradation, including helpful lists of organizations working for preservation. (Apr.)
FairTax: The Truth: Answering the Critics
Neal Boortz and John Linder with Rob Woodall. Harper, $14.95 paper (272p) ISBN 9780061540462
Claiming a growing swell of grassroots support among citizens, experts and politicians—including long-gestating bipartisan legislation in both houses—FairTax proponents Boortz and Linder reconvene (after 2005’s The FairTax Book) to answer critics of their tempting solution to a Byzantium Internal Revenue Code that costs the US over $400 billion a year and works against both businesses and individuals: scrap all income, estate, corporate and payroll taxes, and substitute a national sales tax of 23 percent on all new final goods and services. Designed to be revenue-neutral and progressive, the plan takes into account the working poor with monthly rebates alongside their increased take-home pay, pegging the “regressive” label on the payroll tax, which hits hardest those least able to afford it. Boortz and Linder—a Libertarian radio show host and a Republican congressman, respectively—consider the attacks levied at the FairTax (divided into those “Worth Answering” and those “Barely Worth Dismissing”) and respond snappily with considered arguments, demonstrating for instance how consumers already shoulder retail prices inflated by taxes on production and distribution. Unfortunately, the authors can get tetchy when considering the left wing. The FairTax Book generated over 1500 customer reviews on Amazon, split almost equally between five stars and one star; expect similar reactions for this follow-up. (Mar.)
Howling in Mesopotamia: An Iraqi-American Memoir
Haider Ala Hamoudi. Beaufort, $24.95 (288p) ISBN 9780825305481
After the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, Columbus, Ohio-born lawyer Hamoudi decided to leave his cushy home behind to aid in reconstructing Iraq, his parents’ homeland. Approaching his mission with trepidation and excitement, Hamoudi’s plan—”to participate in the development of a brave new legal world in Iraq… a prosperous, stable, and bright future”—is abruptly supplanted by the need simply to understand his new environment; when asked by an American soldier if most Iraqis are on “our side,” Hamoudi is unsettled to realize “I knew so little about what people were thinking about so fundamental a topic.” Hamoudi’s two-year stay is related in punchy episodes, in which his ignorance and naiveté are stripped away by small revelations and details: in one early scene he visits his family tomb, noting that in the past 25 years, every male relative but two died before age 50; in a much later episode, Hamoudi must hand-deliver each of his wedding invitations because there is no mail service. Despite finding Iraq a country of many disappointments, Hamoudi’s dogged optimism makes repeat appearances, keeping himself, and the reader, from despair. Having called two very different countries home, Hamoudi proves an illuminating guide to the challenges, fears and minor victories that make up daily life in Iraq. (Apr.)
The Magical Chorus: A History of Russian Culture in the Twentieth Century from Tolstoy to Solzhenitsyn
Solomon Volkov, translated from the Russian by Antonina Bouis. Knopf, $30 (352p) ISBN 9781400042722
A sweeping history of the arts in Soviet Russia from the revolution to the 1999 ascendancy of Vladimir Putin, the latest from author Volkov (Shostakovich and Stalin) brings together all the players, from émigrés such as Nabokov, Bunin and Brodsky, to loyalists like Gorky, Stravinsky and Pasternak, to local legends like Pavel Filonov, Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova, as well as a wealth of painters, dancers, actors and filmmakers. Growing up in mid-century Russia, Volkov lived much of this history, and brings it to life with an impressive depth of knowledge and an intensely personal voice. An artist’s relationship with the official party line could have devastating consequences; some of the conflicts between the government and individual artists (particularly those surrounding the Nobel Prize for Literature) were played out on the world stage, but many more were settled with quiet brutality behind the Iron Curtain. Volkov recounts these hidden travesties with indignation and empathy, memorializing well the struggles, contributions and devastating losses. This ambitious work assumes more than a little familiarity with 20th-century Soviet history, making shorthand allusions to people, events and concepts; those without the background, but who are willing to make the effort, will be rewarded with a thorough introduction to the conflicts, artistic and political, that drove Russia in the 20th century. (Mar.)
Red Land, Black Land: Daily Life in Ancient Egypt
Barbara Mertz. Morrow, $26.95 (432p) ISBN 9780061252747
When Mertz first published this book in 1966, she was among the first of the “new breed” of scientific archaeologists using sophisticated, detailed mapping and analytical techniques. The torrent of data produced by this new wave over the past 40 years has given Mertz plenty of material with which to update her works on Egypt (including the recently republished Temples, Tombs & Hieroglyphs). Mertz’s style remains informal and down-to-earth, and her impeccable scholarly credentials never lead her to overstate or dogmatize; she is candid about what is still unknown and what’s speculative, and organizes carefully the evidence against discredited theories. Though much of what is known about ancient Egyptians concerns those wealthy enough to have built elaborate tombs, the excavation of Deir el Medina, a workers’ village near Thebes, has revealed much in recent decades about craftsmen, laborers, peasants and slaves. Mertz’s description and analysis of architecture, wall paintings, sculpture, personal artifacts and papyrus manuscripts (religious texts, inventories, magical recipes, correspondence and even fiction) illuminate vividly the way ancient Egyptians ate, worked, dressed, behaved, entertained, made war, made love and prepared for death. With this thorough update, Mertz may once again inspire a new generation of archaeologists. (Mar.)
LIFESTYLE
Green Chic: Saving the Earth in Style
Christie Matheson. Sourcebooks, $12.95 paper (224p) ISBN 9781402210822
Among a sea of new books on “living green,” this breezy, fun-to-read guide for eco-conscious Sex-and-the-City types sets itself apart with a supportive, winning voice that’s long on common sense and well-sourced info; even better, upscale lifestyle writer Matheson promises from the get-go that “you can definitely be green without giving up everything you love.” As such, she offers valuable tips on finding high-style, high-quality replacements for eco-toxic products, services and indulgences of all kinds—domestics, food and drink, cosmetics, transportation, parties—that won’t harm the earth or the body. Elsewhere, she provides familiar small steps—use fewer plastics, buy organic cotton clothes, walk more and drive less—but does encourage the big steps too (“Get rid of your car—if you can”). She also informs readers in clear language exactly why it’s important to seek out, say, organic wine or a pedicure that eschews chemicals in favor of “scrubs and lotions that [you] would use at home.” Though she dishes some cold, hard facts about the impact everyday choices makes, it’s Matheson’s level-headed, positive attitude and easy-to-implement tips that will inspire the young, hip and easily distracted to take up the cause. (Mar.)
| All Up in Your Grill |
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BBQ Bash: The Be-All, End-All Party Guide, from Barefoot to Black Tie |
ILLUSTRATED
Pop Art Is
Edited by Mark Francis. Yale Univ., $80 (165p) ISBN 9780300138993
The publication of this graceful, gorgeous survey marks the 50 year anniversary of Richard Hamilton’s famous letter defining the concepts of Pop Art, a copy of which appears in the first pages. Perhaps even more instructive is the brief Greil Marcus essay that follows, in which he uses Hamilton’s pioneering collage Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? to elucidate much of the Pop movement’s major tenets: its embrace of banality, commercialism, whimsy and ugliness, its instant relatability and endless capacity for reproduction—in short, the image’s ability to “lodge in your body… as cancers that would consume you from within.” Almost entirely given over to plates, the book covers all the major artists of the original movement—Warhol, Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns and company—and a great deal of more recent work, much from the past 10 years, including pieces from Richard Prince, Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst and Takashi Murakami. Other features include a photographic essay by Louise Lawler and a conversation among multimedia artist Dan Graham and modern architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. Beautifully designed, with vibrant, high-quality plates, this is an excellent greatest-hits overview for a revolutionary art movement that continues to thrive and evolve. (Mar.)
POETRY
The Headless Saints
Myronn Hardy. New Issues (SPD, dist.), $14 paper (85p) ISBN 9781930974760
“The radio buried in sand is language,” one poem early in Hardy’s second book begins, and the pages that follow include broadcasts from all over the world. Bred in Arkansas, now based in New York City, the poet finds terse lines and pithy symbols in cityscapes, seascapes and inland scenes from Venice and Turin, “Somalia or Ethiopia,” “Bahia, Brazil,” in shantytowns, world capitals, and flood zones. “Seaweed circles legs but will not pull/ another body under,” he observes in “The Living”; “This time it drags// a living man to shore.” Hardy’s scenes sometimes stand for the African diaspora, for the survivals and triumphs of the descendants of slaves; often they show the meanings and the links art creates among people who seem dissimilar, as in a poem about the meeting between Abel Meeropol, who wrote the words to “Strange Fruit,” and Billie Holiday, who made the song famous. Sometimes the poems stop short, or say no more than their subjects let readers predict; at others, their terse vigor reinvents what they see. Hardy looks not so much at what photographers or travel writers might include as at the shapes of the lives he can find, or imagine: even amid natural disasters, as in “Tornado,” “coffins/ close,” “bodies break” and “rise invisible souls.” (Apr.)
Red Shifting
Aleksandr Skidan, translated from the Russian by Genya Turovskaya. Ugly Duckling Presse (Consortium, dist.), $15 paper (175p) ISBN 9781939010950
Russian postmodern and avant-garde poetry has been in full flower since the 1980s, but its fruits have only recently begun to show up here. Skidan’s wild (sometimes too wild) multi-page sequences and journal-like prose poems draw on the modern giants of his homeland, but American readers who appreciate its vigor will recognize its goals: Skidan’s drive to disrupt normal channels of communication, to celebrate sexuality and to take apart the norms of the workaday world draws on Surrealism and on hefty thinkers, living (Giorgio Agamben) and dead (Walter Benjamin). An important translator from English into Russian (of Paul Bowles, Slavoj Zizek and Charles Olson), Skidan lets his readers choose whether to revel in the bizarrie of his images, or whether instead to trace intellectual roots: “bodies without organs in the sarcophagus,/ of the Peugeot, the soapy aftertase/ of an unpronounceable vocable” simultaneously depicts a car accident and rewrites a catchphrase from the postmodern theorists Deleuze and Guattari. Another sequence proposes “An archaic encounter on the operating table/ (the interface) of alethia,/ and—stitching shut its mouth rouged/ by the philosopher—// the sewing/ machine of syntax”; a prose piece celebrates the moment what Skidan “finally received something like leave from the prison house of language.” These enthusiastic, fast-paced experiments—rendered vividly into English—may not suit everyone. Yet readers with a taste for verbal disruption and a yen for Modernist ambition should enjoy this rightly influential midcareer poet, in whose work one never knows what will come next. (Apr.)
Unmentionables
Beth Ann Fennelly. Norton, $23.95 (96p) ISBN 9780393066050
What happens when a child of troubled parents from the cold rural Midwest grows up, gets married, bears a son and a daughter, and settles down to writing and teaching poetry amid the abundant heat of Oxford, Mississippi? Fennelly’s very likable third book of verse (she’s also the author of Great With Child: Letters to a Young Mother) pursues such questions with vigor and ease. “A girl at thirty-two, who likes to think she was a rebel,” Fennelly splits her attention between her loves and her duties at home (one poem is called “People Ask What My Daughter Will Think of My Poems When She’s 16,”) and the fertile landscape outside her door, where the “kudzu sees a field of cotton,/ wants to be its better half,” and the humidity (she says) encourages couples to copulate. A funny sestina shows her technical skill; an impressive sequence follows the life of the Impressionist painter Berthe Morisot, inspired by motherhood to “paint fresh as a child sees,” while a less impressive sequence addresses, and imitates, John Berryman, never rising above pastiche. Readers will most likely enjoy, and remember, Fennelly’s most affable, and most personal work—her sweet, enthusiastic memories of good sex in many locales, the comic moments she shares with her children, and her walks around her adopted region, where William Faulkner’s grave inspires her to ask “Am I not a Southern writer now.” (Apr.)
RELIGION
Rapture Ready!: Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture
Daniel Radosh. Scribner, $25 (320p) ISBN 9780743297707
Christian popular culture is a fast-growing and lucrative phenomenon in the US, so much so that Radosh, a Jewish author and contributing editor at The Week magazine, took the time to research this complicated and fascinating world. The author’s style is funny and direct, which helps the prose flow smoothly. He takes the reader on an amusing trek through the sometimes bizarre world of Christian popular culture, deftly critiquing it without being overly condescending. The author discovers that just about everything found in mainstream popular culture has a Christian counterpart: books, all forms of music, television shows, movies, comedy, skateboarding, and even wrestling. Radosh has the astute sense of a journalist and the evocative humor of a stand-up comic. He balances his rather skeptical perspective with respectful stories about the lives of people he encounters. The tension between being in the world and of the world, a common Christian challenge, is present throughout, and reminds all people of faith to question how tightly they wish to embrace popular culture. (Apr.)
When Your Family’s Lost a Loved One: Finding Hope Together
David Guthrie and Nancy Guthrie. Tyndale, $13.99 paper (192p) ISBN 9781589974807
The Guthries are no strangers to grief: they have lost two of their three children to Zellweger Syndrome, a rare metabolic disorder. While they never wanted to become experts on grief, they have found through writing books (Holding on to Hope) and speaking to the bereaved around the country that their experiences of loss and devastation are all too common and all too often misunderstood. Readers who are in mourning want someone who has walked in their shoes, and in this book the Guthries provide not just their own experiences but also the wisdom of many others, whose thoughts are presented in Q&A interviews. The Guthries talk to grief counselors, psychiatrists, educators and most importantly, the bereaved to find out about grief and how to cope with it. The book tackles hard questions—why would God let this happen? Is it all right to take medication to deal with my grief and depression? How do I respond to the cluelessness of others? What is heaven? Can families really grow closer together after losing a loved one? How can I remember the loss, yet move on with life? The Guthries also provide extremely helpful chapters exploring the ways that men and women might grieve differently, and how parents can help their children deal with loss. This is an extraordinary book that will be of great value to families who are grieving. (May)
FICTION
Bikini Season
Sheila Roberts. St. Martin’s Griffin, $13.95 paper (304p) ISBN 9780312370800
It’s January, and four Seattle-area women turn their cooking club into a diet program with the goal of fitting into bikinis by summer. Predictably, each has a problem: party planner Erin can’t fit into her wedding dress and, besides, she’s marrying the wrong man, a fact that’s obvious to everyone but her. A doctor has ordered Kizzy, owner of a home shop (and, at 55, the oldest of the group), to lose weight for health reasons, while chubby homemaker Angela resents her husband’s sexy assistant, and attorney Megan’s lifelong weight issues are undermining her self-confidence. Although Roberts (On Strike for Christmas) stages some amusing scenes as the friends fall into dieting traps and support one another, Angela’s jumping to conclusions and Erin’s cluelessness about her own feelings drag down the proceedings. Of the four women, only Megan seems to spring from a palpable internal reality as she faces her insecurities and takes charge of her career. (May)
The Digital Plague
Jeff Somers. Orbit, $12.99 paper (368p) ISBN 9780316022101
This intense sequel to 2007’s The Electric Church is a strong techno-thriller, but it doesn’t quite match its predecessor in originality. Avery Cates is a killer-for-hire who sold his services to the shadowy System of Federated Nations and destroyed the Electric Church’s plans to turn people into cyborg Monks. Now mysterious assailants have infected Cates with a plague of nanobots that kills anyone he encounters and then reanimates the corpses. His condition draws the attention of the System authorities, who wonder why Cates himself has not fallen victim to the disease and keep him alive in an effort to identify a cure. Amid sometimes flat scenes of gunfighting, betrayal and nanotech zombie uprisings, Cates’s noirish narrative voice stands out as the book’s real strength. Somers’s compelling writing separates this from similar works, and offers hope that future volumes will come closer to the quality of the original. (May)
Ex-Terminator: Life After Marriage
Suzetta Perkins. S&S/Strebor, $15 paper (464p) ISBN 9781593091835
When Sylvia St. James, 45, is left by her husband of 20 years, she is shocked and brokenhearted. In an effort to find strength in numbers, she starts an Atlanta support group: five women and one man who share the need to move on from ruined marriages and “close our Ex-files for good.” The trash talking starts almost immediately—“that woman don’t know how to pick a man,” says 15-years single Arial (who is Sylvia’s hairdresser and not a member of the group) of three-time marriage loser Rachel—but so does the affirmation. Perkins (Behind the Veil) moves things along briskly among the six, with new love, inner strength and the power of forgiveness all playing a role—along with their attendant crises and complications. While the characters themselves are thin, their sizings up of one another crackle with energy. (May)
Fossil Hunter
John B. Olson. Tyndale, $13.99 paper (368p) ISBN 9781414321954
Dr. Katie James is a beautiful, swashbuckling paleontologist renowned for single-handedly fighting off poachers in the desert. She is also a Christian, which in Olson’s fictional world makes her vulnerable to accusations of destroying fossils and rigging data to cast doubt on the evolutionary model. When Katie gets the opportunity to hunt a rare whale fossil in the Iraqi desert, she ends up working with her handsome rival, Nick Murad. After a controversial fossil goes missing, Katie and Nick find themselves not just fighting for their careers, but running for their lives. Despite the fact that Olson occasionally puts stilted speeches about evolution and intelligent design in Katie’s mouth, she is a refreshingly strong and well-written heroine. Polemically, Olson uses the novel to argue against the evils of hubris and bias when it comes to scientific inquiry. He argues for a middle ground between reflexive disbelief in evolution and haughty dismissal of intelligent design, but in doing so will probably appeal only to those who already have some sympathy with the ID movement. (May)
