Salon.com > Must Read http://www.salon.com Sun, 27 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 “Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History” http://www.salon.com/2010/03/01/flawless_2/ http://www.salon.com/2010/03/01/flawless_2/#comments Mon, 01 Mar 2010 00:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/must_read/2010/02/28/flawless Winter, too, has its dog days, when "crisp" feels more like just plain cold, the streets are lined with grimy crusts of snow, and all the interesting holidays are shrinking in the rearview mirror. It's a time of year that calls out for the occasional binge of frivolous reading every bit as much as summer does. "Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History" by Scott Andrew Selby and Greg Campbell, a caper movie in print, complete with European locations and a dash of journalistic scuttlebutt, offers exactly the right blend of diversion and pith. It's a ripping yarn, yes, but a meticulously reported one.

The heist recounted here is the 2003 burglary of a building in Antwerp's storied Diamond District, a neighborhood known for its "in-your-face display of armed, protected and monitored fortifications" that was once deemed "tight as a nun's ass" by a John Gotti henchman. A team of expert Italian thieves, known as the School of Turin, made off with a haul of jewelry, cash, securities, precious metals, gems and, of course, a huge quantity of cut and rough diamonds, the exact value of which could not be determined. At minimum, the job nabbed $100 million in loot, more than any other robbery in history. Four men, out of what Belgian police believe was a minimum of eight conspirators, were ultimately arrested and jailed for the crime.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/03/01/flawless_2/feed/ 9 Christmas insanity unwrapped http://www.salon.com/2009/11/23/tinsel/ http://www.salon.com/2009/11/23/tinsel/#comments Mon, 23 Nov 2009 02:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/must_read/2009/11/22/tinsel Every year, Christmas is directly responsible for some of the worst books to cross a reviewer's desk: stale, overfrosted sugar cookies loaded with the literary equivalent of artificial coloring and high-fructose corn syrup. But now all is forgiven because the season has inspired Hank Stuever to write "Tinsel: A Search for America's Christmas Present," a portrait of the holiday as it's celebrated in the booming Dallas exurb of Frisco, Texas. A delicately calibrated combination of rigorous reporting, observational humor and old-fashioned empathy, "Tinsel" is the book that saved Christmas for this curmudgeon. The first two sentences alone, with their vivid evocation of big-box America and the promise of more crackerjack prose to come, did the trick:

Before the Black Friday dawn, the sky is still a mix of dark blue and the sick sodium-vapor saffron of the suburban night. I park by the Beijing Chinese Super Buffet and walk across the lot to Best Buy, where hundreds of people -- some in their twelfth or thirteenth hour of standing in line -- await the day-after-Thanksgiving doorbuster sale.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/11/23/tinsel/feed/ 24 How memoirs took over the literary world http://www.salon.com/2009/11/16/memoir_4/ http://www.salon.com/2009/11/16/memoir_4/#comments Mon, 16 Nov 2009 02:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/must_read/2009/11/15/memoir Has the memoir become the "central form" of our culture, as Ben Yagoda insists in his breezy new consideration of the form, "Memoir: A History"? Do I detect hackles rising from coast to coast at the mere suggestion? Today, autobiography is both very popular and widely reviled, for reasons that aren't always clear. People complain that the modern memoir is narcissistic, formulaic, pretentious and often falsified -- all true on occasion, though when pressed the accusers can usually list a few contemporary memoirs that they do admire. What is it about the memoir in its current form that makes it simultaneously so irresistible and so annoying?

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/11/16/memoir_4/feed/ 36 Investigating his father’s murder http://www.salon.com/2009/11/09/evening_s_empire/ http://www.salon.com/2009/11/09/evening_s_empire/#comments Mon, 09 Nov 2009 01:07:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/must_read/2009/11/08/evening_s_empire In 1975, Ed Lazar was shot in a Phoenix parking garage stairwell by two men he'd never met. Thirty years later, Lazar's son, Zachary, an acclaimed novelist ("Sway"), began to investigate the murder in preparation for writing "Evening's Empire," a book he had been contemplating for as long as he could remember. No "solution" was called for in any conventional sense of that word: Authorities have known who killed Ed Lazar (two hit men affiliated with the Chicago mafia) and why (they were paid to do it by Ed's former business partner, Ned Warren) for years. But for Zachary, his father's death remained a mystery. How did a quiet, respectable suburban CPA like Ed Lazar, a man whose friends could make no sense of his violent end, wind up dying in what Walter Cronkite described on the CBS Evening News as "a gangland-style murder"?

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/11/09/evening_s_empire/feed/ 6 Archaeologists behaving badly http://www.salon.com/2009/11/02/the_hidden/ http://www.salon.com/2009/11/02/the_hidden/#comments Mon, 02 Nov 2009 01:31:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/must_read/2009/11/01/the_hidden During the early fall, publishers release the highest concentration of books by established writers -- many of which, incidentally, turn out to be disappointing, like this year's offerings from John Irving and Philip Roth. As a result, it's easy to miss fine novels by relative newcomers (who are also less tempted than the big names to phone it in). Tobias Hill's impressive "The Hidden," published last month as a paperback original, is a case in point. Hill, a British poet, novelist and short story writer, likes to take subjects conventionally associated with airport thrillers -- murder mysteries, quests for ancient treasure, conspiracies -- and crack them open to probe for more succulent literary meat. "The Hidden," set on an archaeological dig at the site of ancient Sparta, circles around the suspicious activities of some of the dig's team while dissecting the broken inner life of a young man who wants nothing more than to be let in on their secret.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/11/02/the_hidden/feed/ 6 Elizabeth Taylor: How to Be a Movie Star http://www.salon.com/2009/10/19/elizabeth_taylor/ http://www.salon.com/2009/10/19/elizabeth_taylor/#comments Mon, 19 Oct 2009 07:15:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/must_read/2009/10/19/elizabeth_taylor "Elizabeth Taylor" was one of the answers during a high-speed round of the party game Celebrities I played recently. The player had seconds to get his team to guess her name, and the first thing that popped out of his mouth was, "She twittered her heart surgery." The clue worked, but afterward we clucked over it: Not "National Velvet," not "Cleopatra," not "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" but Twitter? Poor Elizabeth Taylor. We were ashamed of ourselves.

According to William J. Mann, Taylor's latest biographer, we probably shouldn't have been. "How to Be a Movie Star: Elizabeth Taylor in Hollywood," argues that, despite Taylor's half-dozen or so legendary on-screen roles -- including her Oscar-winning portrayal of a posh call girl in "Butterfield 8" -- the instrument she truly mastered was celebrity itself. That she's nabbed a few more headlines by communicating directly with her fans using the latest technology only demonstrates that she hasn't lost her touch.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/10/19/elizabeth_taylor/feed/ 25 The murder she didn’t commit http://www.salon.com/2009/10/05/blame/ http://www.salon.com/2009/10/05/blame/#comments Mon, 05 Oct 2009 07:07:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/must_read/2009/10/05/blame The first glimpse that Michelle Huneven offers of the main character in her new novel, "Blame," comes through the eyes of a dazzled child. Patsy MacLemoore is a blonde with long, tan legs and a perfect smile, and she's dating 12-year-old Joey's dashing uncle, Brice, scion of one of the grand families in the Southern California town of Altadena. She's also a newly minted history professor at a local college. On the surface, Patsy looks great, but in the course of an evening spent with Joey and Brice, she gets drunker and drunker -- also, more desperate: clinging to the elusive Brice and quizzing Joey about her uncle's "other girlfriends." Somewhere in there, she offers to pierce Joey's ears, but the result is lopsided, one hole higher than the other. "Just cock your head to one side," Patsy tells the girl, "and no one will ever notice."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/10/05/blame/feed/ 8 Must read: “Glover’s Mistake” http://www.salon.com/2009/07/23/nick_laird/ http://www.salon.com/2009/07/23/nick_laird/#comments Thu, 23 Jul 2009 10:23:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/must_read/2009/07/23/nick_laird It's easy to underestimate Nick Laird's new novel, "Glover's Mistake," if you only dip your toe into the book. For the first couple of chapters it might be the literary equivalent of one of those early Hugh Grant movies, where the stammering hero trips over his own feet a few times before kissing the girl against a background of quirky, candied pop songs. It's the story of David Pinner, a lovelorn London schoolteacher in his 30s and a never-was artist who vents his frustrated intellect in an anonymous blog he calls (perfectly) the Damp Review. He critiques everything from films to "takeaways," but he finds it easiest "to write on disappointments. Hatreds, easier still."

One day, while leafing through Time Out magazine, David spots a photo of Ruth Marks, an American artist and one of his former instructors, in town for a residency. He attends her opening and diligently engineers a renewed friendship. She's older, talented, charismatic, an emissary from a world of privilege and bohemian glamour who inspires rustling in David's bedraggled romantic hopes.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/07/23/nick_laird/feed/ 6 What should I read next? http://www.salon.com/2009/06/04/aleksandar_hemon/ http://www.salon.com/2009/06/04/aleksandar_hemon/#comments Thu, 04 Jun 2009 10:20:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/must_read/2009/06/04/aleksandar_hemon "You eastern Europeans," says a character in Aleksandar Hemon's novel "Nowhere Man," "are pretty weird." Tell us about it.

By now, readers of Hemon's three previous books --  "The Question of Bruno" (2000), "Nowhere Man" (2002) and "The Lazarus Project" (2008) -- know his story. Born in Sarajevo, he came to the U.S. in 1992 at age 28 on a cultural visa and, scheduled to return home to Bosnia, found that the Yugoslav army was bombarding his homeland. Hemon was granted political asylum and chose to live in Chicago, supporting himself with various jobs that ranged from dishwashing to private detective work. He learned English, he told interviewers, by making lists of words from Nabokov novels and began writing English only three years after he began to study it.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/06/04/aleksandar_hemon/feed/ 1 Must Read: “How to Sell” http://www.salon.com/2009/05/26/clancy_martin/ http://www.salon.com/2009/05/26/clancy_martin/#comments Tue, 26 May 2009 10:23:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/must_read/2009/05/26/clancy_martin Clancy Martin's crackling debut novel, "How to Sell," is the story of Bobby Clark, a 16-year-old Canadian who bails on high school to work at a jewelry store in Texas with his older brother, Jim. The Fort Worth Deluxe Diamond Exchange (and the retail jewelry trade in general, at least as depicted in "How to Sell") turns out to be extravagantly crooked, awash in bogus Rolexes, fake precious metal shares and kited watch orders. No sooner is Bobby off the plane from Calgary than Jim is feeding him bumps of coke out of a vial in the back of a Cadillac limo and inviting the boy to sleep with his head in his mistress' lap.

So, a tale of corruption -- except for the fact that Bobby starts out pretty bent to begin with; the first thing he tells us about himself is that he pawned his mother's wedding ring because his girlfriend was thinking of leaving him and "I knew I could buy her back." When Bobby gets kicked out of high school for stealing a case full of class rings he's flabbergasted because the rings "aren't even worth anything ... You cannot expel me because of some fake rings." The boy can hardly be called an innocent before Jim persuades him to move south with promises of Texan girls who "are all over Canadian guys. They love the foreign accent."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/05/26/clancy_martin/feed/ 3 “Sag Harbor” http://www.salon.com/2009/05/11/colson_whitehead/ http://www.salon.com/2009/05/11/colson_whitehead/#comments Mon, 11 May 2009 10:39:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/must_read/2009/05/11/colson_whitehead One summer night in 1985, near the beach in the Long Island resort town that gives Colson Whitehead's "Sag Harbor" its title, Benji, the novel's awkward, African-American teenage hero, sees a firefly. Millions of those living symbols of ephemerality are glimpsed by millions of kids across every American summer, but this one gets Benji thinking.

"A black bug secret in the night," he tells himself. "Such a strange little guy." The firefly gets its name from "people time, when in fact most of its business went on when people couldn't see it," Benji reflects. "Its true life was invisible to us but we called it firefly after its fractions ... It was a bad name because it was incomplete -- both parts were true, the bright and the dark, the one we could see and the other one we couldn't."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/05/11/colson_whitehead/feed/ 3 “The Little Stranger” http://www.salon.com/2009/05/05/sarah_waters/ http://www.salon.com/2009/05/05/sarah_waters/#comments Tue, 05 May 2009 10:36:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/must_read/2009/05/05/Sarah_waters Ghosts are not supposed to exist, which is one reason why ghost stories are often about things that people try to deny. The rage and sexual longings of lonely, well-bred women, for example, infuse the two great classics of the form: Henry James' "Turn of the Screw" and Shirley Jackson's "The Haunting of Hill House." Sarah Waters' masterly, enthralling new novel, "The Little Stranger," hews to the essential aspects of the traditional ghost story: the big spooky country house with a tragic past, the peculiar noises and eerie events that slowly intensify into a terrifying assault, the blurring line between internal turmoil and external phenomena, the skeptical scientific observer nudged ever closer to belief. Yet Waters has boldly reassigned all these gothic motifs from their usual Freudian duties to another detail entirely: "The Little Stranger" is about class, and the unavoidable yet lamentable price paid when venerable social hierarchies begin to erode.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/05/05/sarah_waters/feed/ 9 “The Song Is You” http://www.salon.com/2009/04/14/arthur_phillips/ http://www.salon.com/2009/04/14/arthur_phillips/#comments Tue, 14 Apr 2009 10:35:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/must_read/2009/04/14/arthur_phillips  Among the characters in Arthur Phillips' 2002 novel, "Prague" -- Americans in their 20s searching for expat authenticity in 1990s Eastern Europe -- is a young academic trying to "quantify nostalgia, to graph it backwards into the misty and sweet-smelling past." He and his cohorts pine not for their own pasts (they've barely had any yet) but for other people's, as romanticized by historians, fans and filmmakers: Paris in the 20s, New York in the '50s, anything but the thin and flavorless here and now. The novel's title shrewdly epitomizes their imaginative displacement: Although it's set in Budapest, everyone there suspects that the better scene is really in Prague.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/04/14/arthur_phillips/feed/ 1 “The Seance” http://www.salon.com/2009/03/16/harwood/ http://www.salon.com/2009/03/16/harwood/#comments Mon, 16 Mar 2009 10:44:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/must_read/2009/03/16/harwood The late 19th century was, like our own time, preoccupied with the dividing line between the scientific and the paranormal. John Harwood's elegant new novel, "The Seance," describes the mixed fortunes of several characters who seem to be suspended over that line. Are they cursed by the past, visited by the dead, condemned by fate? Or are they deceived, by others and by themselves, about the nature of the universe and the human heart?

"The Seance" is a solid, old-fashioned gothic involving several generations of reclusive, obsessive squires and a mouldering old manor house set in the midst of an encroaching, reputedly haunted forest. This property is inherited by one of the novel's narrators, Constance Langton, the daughter of an indifferent father and a mother so stricken by the loss of another child that the only way Constance can reach her is to encourage her belief that she can contact the dead daughter through a spiritualist. This experiment ends badly, to say the least. Then Constance inherits Wraxford Hall from a distant and previously unknown relative, but the lawyer who gives her the news recommends that she "sell the Hall unseen; burn it to the ground and plough the earth with salt, if you will, but never live there."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/03/16/harwood/feed/ 6 “The Believers” http://www.salon.com/2009/03/12/zoe_heller/ http://www.salon.com/2009/03/12/zoe_heller/#comments Thu, 12 Mar 2009 10:37:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/must_read/2009/03/12/zoe_heller Thanks to the title, we know how we're meant to view the characters in Zoë Heller's new novel, "The Believers," even before we crack the book open. The believers in question are the members of the Litvinoff family, specifically Audrey, wife and mother, and her two daughters, Rosa and Karla. The paterfamilias, Joel, spends most of the novel in a post-stroke coma, having collapsed in the midst of a sensational trial. A storied leftist attorney manifestly modeled after William Kunstler, Joel met Paul Robeson as a kid at a red-diaper summer camp, worked for Martin Luther King Jr., and at the moment of his collapse had been just about to defend a member of "the Schenectady Six," Arab-Americans accused of supporting terrorism.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/03/12/zoe_heller/feed/ 0 “The Birthday Present” http://www.salon.com/2009/03/06/rendell/ http://www.salon.com/2009/03/06/rendell/#comments Fri, 06 Mar 2009 11:44:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/must_read/2009/03/06/rendell Barbara Vine's new novel, "The Birthday Present," is a tale of two monsters -- monsters of the entirely human and not especially exotic variety, that is. One is Ivor Tesham, a young, rich and handsome Tory M.P. who, in 199o, arranges the pretend kidnapping of his married mistress, Hebe, as a sex game. The other is Jane Atherton, Hebe's drab and resentful school friend, who has been providing the adulterous wife with alibis for the evenings she spends with Ivor. The "kidnapping" results in a fatal accident on a London street, leading in turn to two crucial choices. Neither Ivor nor Jane, apparently the only ones left who know what Hebe was doing handcuffed in the back of a van, come forward with that knowledge. Each is motivated by pure selfishness, and a terrible machinery of chance and fate is set into motion.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/03/06/rendell/feed/ 0 “Lark and Termite” http://www.salon.com/2009/01/28/jayne_anne_phillips/ http://www.salon.com/2009/01/28/jayne_anne_phillips/#comments Wed, 28 Jan 2009 11:40:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/must_read/2009/01/28/jayne_anne_phillips Jayne Anne Phillips belongs to that small class of contemporary fiction writers who can never entirely shake the shadow of an early, very successful short story collection. (Others are Denis Johnson, Nathan Englander, Jhumpa Lahiri and Ethan Canin.) Although short stories are supposed to be unpopular (and are widely regarded by publishers as commercial long shots), the right collection by a young writer -- especially if it does or shows something not easily found elsewhere -- can arrive radiantly, glowing with the promise of splendors to come. By the time the novel appears, expectations have grown unrealistic, and a faint and often merited whiff of disappointment clings to it; it is the perfectly tasty entree served after a truly delicious appetizer, which, like all appetizers, benefits from offering no more than a taste.

Phillips' collection, "Black Tickets," when it was first published in 1979, defied the prevailing fictional trend toward minimalism. If Hemingway founded one major strain of American fiction -- terse, plain-spoken and stoic -- Faulkner lies at the root of another; Phillips updated Faulkner's verdant, impressionistic prose by applying it to vignettes about young, damaged characters drifting through hard-luck lives tainted by drugs and dangerous sex. Certain readers clutched "Black Tickets" to their hearts as a validation not only of its subject matter but also of its intensely personal, poetic style.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/01/28/jayne_anne_phillips/feed/ 3 All-American terrorist http://www.salon.com/2008/12/17/duncan_2/ http://www.salon.com/2008/12/17/duncan_2/#comments Wed, 17 Dec 2008 11:32:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2008/12/17/duncan Glen Duncan doesn't exactly write thrillers and doesn't exactly write literary novels. Indeed, the 43-year-old English writer has developed an intriguing and soulful fusion of the two, churning out intricately plotted page-turners that'll keep you up all night while their protagonists wrestle with God, the modern world's loss of meaning and the painful and awful facts of recent history. In "Death of an Ordinary Man," Duncan's hero was a ghost, trying to sort out his family's damage from the other side; in his 2007 novel "The Bloodstone Papers," he focused on a writer of Anglo-Indian ancestry (like Duncan himself) who's trying to track down the legendary con man who ruined his father's life.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/12/17/duncan_2/feed/ 1 “Serena” http://www.salon.com/2008/12/16/rash/ http://www.salon.com/2008/12/16/rash/#comments Tue, 16 Dec 2008 11:43:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/must_read/2008/12/16/rash There’s something unabashedly hokey  about Ron Rash’s "Serena," a novel of love, hate and clear-cutting set in Depression-era North Carolina -- and I mean that in the best possible way. It resembles one of those high-end mid-20th-century bestsellers with a title lifted from Ecclesiastes and a movie version in Technicolor, directed by Douglas Sirk, with a tag line like, "They were as bold as the country that made them!" The good guys in this melodrama are good, the bad guys are really bad and the meaning of it all is crystal clear. There’s even a chorus of crusty old lumberjacks hanging around to comment on the action in case any readers fail to get the point. In an age when literary fiction is so intent on subtlety that it often winds up virtually inert, a novel with this much uncomplicated gusto and narrative drive is a rare thing; in the case of  "Serena," it's also a welcome one.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/12/16/rash/feed/ 6 “Winnie and Wolf” http://www.salon.com/2008/11/25/an_wilson/ http://www.salon.com/2008/11/25/an_wilson/#comments Tue, 25 Nov 2008 11:29:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/must_read/2008/11/25/an_wilson  For sheer number of innocent people exterminated under an infamous regime, Hitler is no match for Stalin. Yet our fascination with the fiery, scary Führer as "the incarnation of absolute evil," as Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel once called him, far surpasses our interest in practically all other hateful villains in modern history. In his highly imaginative novel "Winnie and Wolf," prolific British novelist and historian A.N. Wilson has taken an intriguingly dispassionate look at Hitler's inner circle. The novel, which came out in the U.K. last year, was nominated for the Man Booker Prize. Despite this high level of acclaim, readers may wonder why Wilson would bother taking a sober, realistic look at Hitler and thereby risk humanizing him. But among Wilson's 35 books is a biography of Jesus that is mostly about the impossibility of writing a biography of Jesus; Wilson is not one to back down from a challenge.

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