| ||||
|
Arts & Entertainment  BooksComics Health & Body Media Mothers Who Think News People Politics2000 Technology - Free Software Project Travel & Food  Columnists
Current Click here to read the latest stories from the wires. - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - Also Today For a full list of today's Salon Books stories, go to the
Books home page. - - - - - - - - - - - - Search Salon - - - - - - - - - - - - Recently in Salon Books Reviews Reviews Dear Mr. Blue Book Bag - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
Salon Book Awards | page 1, 2, 3
Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War Excerpt | Order a Copy | Original Salon Review - - - - - - - - - - - - Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley Excerpt | Order a Copy | Original Salon Review - - - - - - - - - - - - Lost on Earth: Nomads of the New World Excerpt | Order a Copy | Original Salon Review - - - - - - - - - - - - Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette Excerpt | Order a Copy | Original Salon Review - - - - - - - - - - - - Show Me a Hero: A Tale of Murder, Suicide, Race and Redemption Excerpt | Order a Copy
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About the writer
About the writer Table Talk Sound off Related Salon stories The Salon Book Awards 1997 The Salon Book Awards 1998
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Search Salon | |||
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
A real nail-biter, Mark Bowden's account of the 1993 raid on Mogadishu that resulted in the deaths of 18 American servicemen and more than 500 Somalis has been called one of the most accurate accounts of combat ever. With no experience in battle and little more with battle scenes, we can only testify that it's a dazzlingly lucid, hair-raising depiction of total chaos. Bowden presents the conflict from dozens of points of view, including those of Somali civilians and of the United States' elite Delta Force operators. If the ice-and-
The second and final volume of Guralnick's massive Elvis project doesn't hunt for meanings and it doesn't judge -- or at least, it tries not to. The singer's life from October 1958, when he arrived in Germany to complete his tour of duty with the army, to his ugly and undignified death in the summer of 1977 wasn't all downhill, and his triumphs -- notably his 1968 television special and his first Las Vegas performances the following year -- take his biographer just as high as they took his audiences. But for most of this meticulous chronicle of second-rate movies, second-rate recordings and increasingly erratic (to put it euphemistically) concert performances, Guralnick can barely conceal his exasperation and his sadness. Yet he never loses sight of his subject's talent and generosity, and he answers it with a talent and generosity of his own. Out of his narrowly focused month-by-month record of Elvis Presley's fall arises a terrible and, in its way, magnificent fable of American excess, arrogance, weakness and waste.
Reporter Mark Fritz lays out his tales of refugees and refugee workers with a short-story master's feel for character and plot. He has a real talent for affability: Almost without exception he likes the people whose stories he tells, and while their hardships obviously matter to him, what captures his imagination and his skill is their personalities. His portraits of the uprooted encompass natives of lands as diverse as Germany and Iraq and Togo and Bosnia, but no one he writes about seems foreign; he puts us in his subjects' shoes by showing us how very much like us they are. (And he drives home the point that there is no longer anything anomalous about their experience, reporting that in the mid-1990s, roughly one out of every 100 people on the planet was forcibly uprooted from home.) He also has a gift for making tangled clashes (the Liberian civil war, for instance) easy to follow without talking down in the process. Although Fritz's subject matter is cruel, his book is strangely delightful -- on one level an outcry against acts of inhumanity, but on another a celebration of our common humanity.
Massive, research-
Belkin's generous, intuitive story of the forced integration of Yonkers, N.Y., in the late 1980s and early '90s is the kind of nonfiction book that writers attempting bold social novels (paging Tom Wolfe) might take as a challenge. It's packed with compelling characters: the stern, idealistic judge who orders the city to build public housing in middle-class white neighborhoods (and nearly bankrupts the municipal government with fines when it defies him); the visionary but cold-blooded planner who believes that townhouses rather than high-rises will solve the chronic ills plaguing such developments; the little old lady in tennis shoes who starts out agitating against the housing and winds up advocating for its residents; the poor, struggling mothers for whom it is their last best hope; and the 29-year-old mayor who stands up to the local demagogues (their followers throw Pampers at him) and pays a terrible price. 
