THE MEASURE OF ALL THINGS: The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error That Transformed the World
Ken Alder, Author . Free Press $27 (416p) ISBN 978-0-7432-1675-3
Alder delivers a triple whammy with this elegant history of technology, acute cultural chronicle and riveting intellectual adventure built around Delambre's and Méchain's famed meridian expedition of 1792–1799 to calculate the length of the meter. Disclosing for the first time details from the astronomers' personal correspondences (and supplementing his research with a bicycle tour of their route), Alder reveals how the exacting Méchain made a mistake in his calculations, which he covered up, and which tortured him until his death. Méchain, remarkably scrupulous even in his doctoring of the data, was driven in part by his conviction that the quest for precision and a universal measure would disclose the ordered world of 18th-century natural philosophy, not the eccentric, misshapen world the numbers suggested. Indeed, Alder has placed Delambre and Méchain squarely in the larger context of the Enlightenment's quest for perfection in nature and its startling discovery of a world "too irregular to serve as its own measure." Particularly fascinating is his treatment of the politics of 18th-century measurement, notably the challenge the savants of the period faced in imposing a standard of weights and measures in the complicated post–ancien régime climate. Alder convincingly argues that science and self-knowledge are matters of inference, and by extension prone to error. Delambre, a Skeptical Stoic, was the more pragmatic and, perhaps, the more modern of the two astronomers, settling as he did for honesty in error where precision was out of reach. (Oct.)
Forecast:Tales of innovations made by fascinating characters against long odds have undoubted appeal—witness Longitude, The Map That Changed the World, even The Professor and the Madman. With the Free Press's big publicity push—including a 10-city author tour and 20-city radio satellite tour— The Measure of All Things looks ready to join their bestselling ranks.
Staff
Emilie Richards, Author . Mira $23.95 (464p) ISBN 978-1-55166-921-2
Richards (Fox River) adds to the territory staked out by such authors as Barbara Delinsky and Kristin Hannah with her hardcover debut, an engrossing novel about rebuilding relationships after a betrayal. Faith Bronson, daughter of an overbearing U. S. senator and wife of a conservative family-values lobbyist, gets a shock when she stumbles upon her beloved husband with his male lover. After the development becomes public, the repercussions sweep away her sheltered life and profoundly affect her children, nine-year-old Alex and 14-year-old Remy, as well as her parents' marriage. Faith's new life begins when her mother gives her their old family home in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C., which is badly in need of repair. The house guards long-buried secrets: some sweet, some tragic and some pertaining to the unsolved kidnapping of Faith's older sister as an infant. While Faith attempts to come to terms with her family's past, she must rein in rebellious Remy, who's resentful of having to move to a new house and a new school, and deal with her attraction to Internet entrepreneur Pavel Quinn, a man with secrets of his own. Over the course of a year, Faith renovates the house and, in the process, lays down the foundation for her future. Richards's writing is unpretentious and effective ("She'd never had to think about what to say to her daughter. Now every word needed a rehearsal"), and her characters burst with vitality and authenticity despite a dose of sentimentality near the end. (July)
Staff
CHINA RUN
David Ball, Translator . Simon & Schuster $24 (384p) ISBN 978-0-7432-2743-8
Ball (Empires of Sand) explores the dark side of American adoption of Chinese babies in his compulsively readable thriller. When Allison Turk, who has traveled to Jiangsu province with her stepson, Tyler, to adopt the infant Wen Li, is told that she has been given the wrong baby, she decides to make a run for it rather than give up her beautiful daughter. Single mother Ruth Pollard along with Claire Cameron and Claire's husband, Nash, also choose to flee with their babies. Hoping to reach an American consulate, they become increasingly tangled in the Chinese heartland, as they trek across the country pursued by the forces of a bureaucratic government. The case attracts international attention, and Ruth's cousin, an American senator, begins to questions China's most favored nation status. A score of unforgettable characters provide portraits of both bravery and treachery: the selfless guide, Yu Ling, and her peasant family; the military men, led by implacable Colonel Quan and his subordinate Ma Lin, who finally ignores direct commands; and greedy peasants, petty thieves and murderers. Much of the novel's strength derives from the author's remarkable evocation of Chinese language and Chinese landscape, whether it's in mud and monsoon or a beautiful monastery with beatific monks. Before the last breathless page, readers will encounter panic, killings, a ship collision and a devastating revelation of the truth behind the government's action. Though the subject matter is delicate, this sweeping odyssey of action and sentiment set in exotic and gritty locales cries out for filming. Literary Guild, Mystery Guild and BOMC alternates.(Aug. 4)
Staff
Chuck Palahniuk, Author . Doubleday $24.95 (256p) ISBN 978-0-385-50447-8
"I need to rebel against myself. It's the opposite of following your bliss. I need to do what I most fear." Beleaguered reporter Carl Streator is stuck writing about SIDS and grieving for his dead wife and child; he copes by building perfect model homes and smashing them with a bare foot. But things only get worse: Carl accidentally memorizes an ancient African "culling song" that kills anyone he focuses on while mentally reciting it, until killing "gets to be a bad habit." His only friend, Nash, a creepy necrophiliac coroner, amuses himself with Carl's victims. Salvation of a sort comes in the form of Helen Hoover Boyle, a witch making a tidy living as a real estate broker selling—and quickly reselling—haunted houses. She, too, knows the culling song and finances her diamond addiction by freelancing as a telepathic assassin. Carl and Helen hit the road with Helen's Wiccan assistant, Mona, and her blackmailing boyfriend, Oyster, on a search-and-destroy mission for all outstanding copies of the culling song, as well as an all-powerful master tome of spells, a grimoire. Hilarious satire, both supernatural and scatological, ensues, the subtext of which seems to be Palahniuk's conviction that information has become a weapon ("Imagine a plague you catch through your ears"), and the bizarre love affair between Helen and Carl offers the lone linear thread in a field of narrative flak bursts. But the chief significance of this novel is Palahniuk's decision to commit himself to a genre, and this horror tale of both magic and mundane modernity plants him firmly in a category where previously he existed as a genre of one. (Sept.)Forecast:Mainstream men's magazines and über-hip glossies love Palahniuk, as do his rabid fans (generally of the young male persuasion), so there's an automatic audience for this title.
Staff
Alan Cumming, Preface by . HarperCollins/Regan
Books $24.95 (272p) ISBN 978-0-06-039444-8
A young British pansexual with a penchant for chemical and physical excess stars in award-winning actor Cumming's (Cabaret, Eyes Wide Shut) zany debut. As his 30th birthday looms, Tommy grapples with both his desire to have a child and his fear of settling down. He also embarks on numerous benders ("I have coke spilling out of my left nostril, a ten-pound note jammed up my right"), while roommates Bobby, a gay lamp-shade designer, and Sadie, a mother-figure of sorts, plus lover Charlie and Charlie's eight-year-old son, try to help Tommy grow up. Cumming infuses the narrative with obscenities, puns, pop culture references and fairy tales, the latter appearing at crucial points in the plot as thinly veiled stories about Tommy himself. Cumming also gleefully overemploys the literary gimmick: there are lists of advice on anything from drinking to depression, flashbacks, jump cuts ("we're doing one of those time-jump things," Tommy notes), subtitles, interviews and direct appeals to the reader. Though at times insightful and clever ("Charlie belonged to that lucky, lucky group of normal people who are not waiting for their lives to start," Tommy says of his lover), the book often feels as hysterical and muddled as its narrator does. While Cumming explores plenty of graphic sexual escapades, bigger matters—such as Tommy's transformation from boy to man at the book's end—are left unexamined. At the core of this book is a charming personality—intelligent, frolicking, sensitive and sexual—but only rarely does it emerge from amid the extremes of story and style. (Sept.)
FYI:Those who liked Cumming's character in the movie The Anniversary Party will find Tommy appealingly familiar, and for fans of Sex and the City, here's the novel version—albeit a bit racier and with a predominantly gay cast.
Staff
MINIATURES
Norah Labiner, Author . Coffee House $23 (402p) ISBN 978-1-56689-136-3
"In fact, one does not really need a story so much these days. Every story hangs on the thread, hitches a ride on the hips of all the stories that have come before." With that bon mot, Labiner (Our Sometime Sister) introduces her outrageous second novel, a freewheeling, over-the-top tribute to the prose styles of such literary giants as the Brontë sisters, Proust and Mary Shelley. Labiner's heroine is the precociously intelligent Fern Jacobi, who interrupts her after-college travels in Ireland to work as a housekeeper for a pair of odd writers, Owen and Brigid Lieb. Owen is the more experienced and successful of the two, but his track record with women is a bit shabby—his first wife, Franny, committed suicide despite a successful literary career of her own, and Brigid soon forms an alliance with Jacobi when she feels pressured to come up with her own inaugural writing project. The rather threadbare plot is largely an excuse for Labiner to trot out her main calling card, a brilliantly literate and wildly digressive style full of literary allusions, historical references and clever observations on pop culture. Most of these passages are thought provoking and entertaining, but Labiner does include plenty of overly cute and self-indulgent stretches, along with some conceits that simply don't work. She makes up for her shortcomings, however, by taking readers on a roller-coaster ride through the world of writers, culture, history and literature that is always intriguing and often compelling. (Sept.)
Staff
Daniel Mason, Author . Knopf $24 (336p) ISBN 978-0-375-41465-7
Twenty-six-year-old Mason has penned a satisfying, if at times rather slow, debut historical novel. Edgar Drake lives a quiet life in late 19th-century London as a tuner of rare pianos. When he's summoned to Burma to repair the instrument of an eccentric major, Anthony Carroll, Edgar bids his wife good-bye and begins the months-long journey east. The first half of the book details his trip, and while Mason's descriptions of the steamships and trains of Europe and India are entertaining, the narrative tends to drag; Edgar is the only real character readers have met, and any conflicts he might encounter are unclear. Things pick up when Edgar meets the unconventional Carroll, who has built a paradise of sorts in the Burmese jungle. Edgar ably tunes the piano, but this turns out to be the least of his duties, as Carroll seeks his services on a mission to make peace between the British and the local Shan people. During his stay at Carroll's camp, Edgar falls for a local beauty, learns to appreciate the magnificence of Burma's landscape and customs and realizes the absurdity of the war between the British and the Burmese. While Mason's writing smoothly evokes Burma's beauty, and the idea that music can foster peace is compelling, his work features so many familiar literary pieces—the nerdy Englishman; the steamy locale; the unjust war; the surprisingly cultured locals—that readers may find themselves wishing they were turning the pages of Orwell's Burmese Days or E.M. Forster's A Passage to India instead. (Sept.)
Forecast:Mason—who spent a year on theThai-Myanmar border researching malaria and is now in medical school—offers a book that will appeal to Michael Ondaatje fans. The evocative, sepia-toned jacket may draw in women readers, who may suggest it for reading clubs.
Staff
THE LAST GIRLS
Lee Smith, Foreword by . Algonquin $24.95 (400p) ISBN 978-1-56512-363-2
The Big Chill meets Huckleberry Finn in a moving novel inspired by a real-life episode. Thirty-six years ago, Smith (Oral History) and 15 other college "girls" sailed a raft down the Mississippi River from Kentucky to New Orleans in giddy homage to Huck. Here she reimagines that prefeminist odyssey, and then updates it, as four of the raft's alumnae take a steamboat cruise in 1999 to recreate their river voyage and scatter the ashes of one of their own. What results is an unsentimental journey back to not-quite-halcyon college days of the mid-1960s ("periods cramps boys dates birth babies the works") masterfully intercut with more recent stories of marriages, infidelities, health crises and career moves, all set firmly in the South. At first the characters threaten to be mere stereotypes: innocent, self-sacrificing Harriet; arty, maternal Catherine; brittle Southern belle Courtney; brassy romance novelist Anna. But Smith reveals surprising truths about each character, even as she suggests that the fate of their departed classmate—the wild, promiscuous, possibly suicidal Baby—may never be understood. The steamboat setting provides ample opportunities to skewer cruise ship tackiness and Southern kitsch, a witty counterpoint to the often troubled personal stories of the passengers. Readers who like their plots linear may be challenged by the tangle of tales, but those who agree that "there are no grown-ups," and that there's "no beginning and no end" to the "real story" of people's lives, will find this tender, generous, graceful novel a delight. Agent, Liz Darhansoff. Literary Guild, Doubleday Book Club and BOMC selections; 15-city author tour. (Sept. 27)
Staff
Tim O'Brien, Editor . Houghton Mifflin $26 (336p) ISBN 978-0-618-03969-2
After a comedic hiatus with 1998's Tomcat in Love, O'Brien expands on themes he explored in some of his best-known earlier novels: memory, hope, love, war. It's July 2000 and members of the Darton Hall College class of 1969 are gathered, one year behind schedule, for their 30th reunion. Focusing on sharply drawn characters and life's pivotal moments rather than on a strong linear plot, O'Brien follows the ensemble cast (which includes a Vietnam vet, a draft dodger, a minister, a bigamous housewife and a manufacturer of mops) for whom "the world had whittled itself down to now or never," as they drink, flirt and reminisce. Interspersed are tales of other Julys, when each character experienced something that changed him or her forever. Jump-cutting across decades, O'Brien reveals past loves and old betrayals that still haunt: Dorothy failed to follow Billy to Canada; Spook hammered out a "double marriage"; Ellie saw her lover drown; Paulette, in a moment of desperation, disgraced herself and ruined her career. Comedy and pathos define the reunion days, while the histories often devastate. Because they are such dramatic moments—a tryst that ends tragically, a near-death experience on the bank of a foreign river, the aftermath of a radical mastectomy—some of them feel contrived, almost hyperbolic. Still, this is a poignant and powerful page-turner, and a testament to a generation. National advertising; national author tour. (Oct. 1)
Forecast:O'Brien is poised to secure a sizable readership in his age bracket, and the excerpts in the New Yorker and Esquire won't hurt either, but O'Brien's younger fans—all those who discovered The Things They Carried when it was assigned to them in class—might be less intrigued by this "definitive novel" of the baby boom cohort.
Staff
Umberto Eco, Author , trans. from the Italian by William Weaver. Harcourt $27 (528p) ISBN 978-0-15-100690-8
In this now annual feature, PW takes a look at BEA's most talked-about books and weighs in to let readers know whether they measure up to the hopes and the hype.
In another grand mythical epic, Eco transports readers to the medieval Italy of The Name of the Rose (though almost two centuries earlier), where Frederick Barbarossa seeks to establish himself as the Holy Roman emperor. The story begins in 1204, as the Byzantium capital of Constantinople is sacked and Baudolino, the adoptive son of Frederick, recounts his life to Byzantine historian Niketas, whom he has just saved from the barbaric Latins. Unfolding amid religious conspiracy theories and mysticism, the narrative, which builds slowly, follows the life of Baudolino, an Italian peasant boy who fabricates stories he realizes people want to believe in. While studying in Paris, Baudolino meets several friends from all over the world, who together divulge their intimate dreams and share their desire to discover distant places. Two decades later, Baudolino calls together his friends to embark on what will be a lifelong journey to find Prester John, the Christian priest of the East, whose fabled reputation Baudolino has helped create. Eco seems to loosen the reins when the friends set out across unknown territories, where they grope through an eternally dark forest; traverse a river of stones and boulders; and encounter such mythical creatures as the sled-footed skiapods, dog-headed cynocephali and the Hypatia, beautiful sirens with the legs of goats. While the pilgrims are aware, to a certain extent, of Baudolino's truth-stretching, they all come to believe in their search, as does Baudolino himself. Eco builds his story upon light theological and historical debates, though fiction and history are more evenly balanced than in his previous book, The Island of the Day Before, making for a more engaging read. While this book lacks the suspense of The Name of the Rose, it is nevertheless a spirited story that might offer those previously daunted by his writing a more accessible entrée. (Oct. 15)
Forecast:The marketing equivalent of trumpets ($400,000 worth) herald this latest novel from Eco (who will tour five cities). Already a bestseller in Europe, and issued here in a first printing of 400,000, Baudolino is sure to follow the course of Eco's previous three novels.
Staff
