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Must do’s: What we like this week

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 14:00:00 +0000

BOOKS

Laura Miller, who generally does not have “patience for the touchstones of foodie literature,” was pleasantly surprised by Michael Pollan’s “Cooked,” written from the perspective of a journalist and gardener rather than a celebrity chef:

His effort to deepen his understanding of the process of turning food into meals is the subject of his latest book, “Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation.” I wish I could say “Cooked” is entirely free of moments of flabby philosophizing (“Isn’t it always precisely when we are most at risk of floating away on the sea of our own inventions and conceits that we seem to row our way back to the firm shore that is nature?”), but they are rare. Admittedly, the book’s thematic structure is also a shade precious. It’s divided into four sections according to what the ancients perceived to be the four elements — fire, water, air and earth — each attributed to a different cooking method — grilling, braising and other forms of cooking in liquids, baking and fermentation. As ever, Pollan makes each of these themes the occasion for real thought as well as some energetic reporting.

“Cooked”: Michael Pollan takes kitchen duty

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 22:00:00 +0000

Much food writing is little more than a gaseous substance that collects around recipes and advice. I like to cook and make most of my own meals, but I have no patience for the touchstones of foodie literature, like M.F.K. Fisher, with her preening sensuality, or the imperious fussiness of Richard Olney. Nigella Lawson's phone-sex cooing makes me grind my teeth. Just cut the mystification and razzamatazz, and tell me how to make a decent lentil soup, already! While we're at it, I also hate celebrity chefs and rhapsodic restaurant reviews. Especially during a week like the one we've just had, most food writing manifests a serious disorder of perspective, and its perpetrators come across as more navel-gazing and trivia-obsessed than the most self-involved memoirist.

Apart from flashing my curmudgeon credentials, I'm trying to say that in this department, my bar is set pretty high. There are three food writers I will listen to. Two are true cooks (not chefs): the peerless Mark Bittman, who understands what does and does not matter about how we cook and eat, and Martha Stewart, who -- say what you will! -- taught me everything I know about baking. (Julia Child seems delightfully down-to-earth, but I'm not very interested in French cooking.)

“The Astor Orphan”: Rich little poor girl

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 22:00:00 +0000

Alexandra Aldrich grew up being told that she lived in a "child's paradise": a largely deserted, 43-room, 200-year-old house on 420 acres in the Hudson River Valley, complete with woods, animals, interesting outbuildings and bohemian tenants who made giant puppets and staged elaborate pageants. A twig on a branch of the fabled and wealthy Astor and Livingstone family trees, Aldrich played dress-up in evening gowns her grandmother had worn to high-society events and wound a hand-cranked gramophone that was a personal gift from Thomas Edison.

She hated it. As Aldrich recounts in her new memoir, "The Astor Orphan," "I had always wished I could have grown up in a three-bedroom ranch house with employed parents, siblings, cable TV and functional cars." She might also have added "regular meals," since the pantry in her family's section of Rokeby, the ancestral mansion where her people have lived for almost two centuries, was often bare. If her father couldn't snag a free batch of rejected TV dinners from a nearby pie factory, he'd have to borrow money from the local gas station proprietor for groceries. Her mother, a solitary (and, by all signs, depressed) Polish fiber artist -- who had thought she was marrying into a wealthy urban clan -- would only shout from the kitchen, "You'll have to eat shit for dinner if you can't dig up any cash!"

“How to Create the Perfect Wife”

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 22:00:00 +0000

"The Dying Negro" -- the first major anti-slavery poem in English -- was the talk of London in the summer of 1773. Although the bestselling pamphlet was published anonymously, a wealthy young political progressive named Thomas Day let it be known that he was the author. Over the next decade and a half, Day would become a familiar and fiery public voice on behalf of abolition and the independence of the American colonies, as well as an early campaigner against cruelty toward animals. He would also write a hugely popular children's novel, "The History of Sandford and Merton." But, as Wendy Moore observes in her transfixing new book on Day, in the year "The Dying Negro" was published, few readers "would have suspected that its chief author secretly maintained a teenage girl who was completely subordinate to his commands and whims."

The title of Moore's book, "How to Create the Perfect Wife," explains what Day was up to. From an early age -- sniffing at the revelry in that 18th-century party school, Oxford -- Day knew exactly how he intended to live. He planned to commit himself to "the unremitting practice of the severest virtue." He would adopt an austere existence in the country, thinking, reading, writing and doing good works, while receiving few visitors. The one thing he required to achieve this nirvana was a mate, and for that, too, he had something very particular in mind.

Is journalism killing my creativity?

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Dear Cary,

I am a writer. I love to write, and I make my living from writing, in journalism. I gave up a full-time newspaper job to freelance some years ago, which in many ways (not financially) was a great move. So I write and research and work hard every day, pretty much, and hundreds, thousands of words flow easily, which are then published in newspapers, magazines, online. It's great; it's so satisfying to make a well-crafted piece of work.

Yet I don't feel like a real writer. Both a screenplay based on a true story and a novel based on my own early life came grinding to a halt. Without being egotistical, I've been around long enough to know they are both excellent topics, great stories. But I just freeze up after three chapters or a couple of acts. I can't seem to keep going. The bio-novel made me incredibly anxious, bringing up memories I don't want to deal with but must to get them on the page. So I tried it as nonfiction, a pop-culture documentary, switching the focus somewhat and looking at events from a more journalistic angle. Nup.

Aleksandar Hemon: “I cannot stand that whole game of confession. I have nothing to confess and I do not ask for redemption”

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 23:00:00 +0000

Though I've known Aleksandar Hemon over the years — we first met at the book party for his second work of fiction, "Nowhere Man," at his publisher's house in New York — I've only had a chance to really sit and talk with him in Chicago, my native city and his adopted hometown. I interviewed him in 2009 for Bookforum, about "Love and Obstacles," his last collection of stories, when he told me he hated memoir — which made me laugh, especially since his editor published James Frey, whose loose interpretation of the form landed the "memoirist" in hot water with the formidable Oprah Winfrey. But I remember thinking, as we parted ways, if anyone should be writing memoir, it should be Hemon, a man who has led at least two distinct lives: one in Sarajevo just before the siege, and then his life as an accidental, now naturalized citizen of Chicago, after a junket to the States left him stranded here, unable to return to his war-torn home. And while he has expertly mined this bisected existence for his fiction, I was eager as a reader and as an acquaintance, to learn the "true stories," as they call them in Bosnia (Hemon explains there are no words in Bosnian for "fiction" or "nonfiction," per se).

Must Do’s: What we like this week

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 14:00:00 +0000

BOOKS

Laura Miller, a Yankee, was enlightened by former newspaper reporter Tracy Thompson's deeply personal account of the transformation of Georgia, titled "The New Mind of the South":

Thompson gives "The New Mind of the South" a muscular tension that a merely nostalgic memoir or a self-effacing work of reportage could never achieve. She vividly recalls the embracing evangelical church life of her 1960s youth, when the religion was "otherworldly and apolitical" and therefore a marked contrast to the activist fundamentalism that arose in the 1970s or the show-bizzy extravaganza of a megachurch she visits in suburban Atlanta. Yet the latter, an outpost of the "prosperity gospel," turns out to be more multiracial and feminist than she expected. Such churches can’t provide her with the comfort she once found in the small church where her family used to worship, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t doing some good.

“The New Mind of the South”: Not your daddy’s Dixie

Sun, 17 Mar 2013 22:30:00 +0000

Tracy Thompson, a former newspaper reporter born and raised in Georgia, first got the idea for her book, "The New Mind of the South," when a cousin passed on a startling bit of family history. Their shared ancestor, Thomas Thompson, was a Union man. Thompson clan legend held that Thomas had briefly pretended to support the Union, but only because he hoped to be reimbursed for property confiscated by General Sherman. Thomas was in truth a staunch anti-Confederate according to documents held in the National Archive. Furthermore, he wasn't alone; Thompson found two dozen similar cases from the same small county when she visited the archives herself. "I'd always wondered why, unlike every other Southern family I knew, ours had no Civil War stories, " she remarks.

Joan Didion’s “Salvador” delves into the heart of darkness

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 19:00:00 +0000

Over the last few years, I’ve been sent 400 to 500 review copies of books and audiobooks. I haven’t read them all, although I have tried to read at least a handful of pages of all of them, or listen to at least the first couple of minutes. Most of them have offered at least some pleasures to reward the time, and I’m happy in general that we live in a world where there is a place even for books and audiobooks that appeal to the narrowest of audiences.

The most striking thing about all this reading and listening is how few of these books and audiobooks have taken up any kind of long-term residence in my mind and in my life – how few have troubled me so that I think about them months and years after I thought I had finished my time with them, and how few have brought pleasure or solace of the sort that cause me to want to reread them.

If I tried to categorize what it is that gives these books their special staying power, the first thing I might do is make a list of the qualities that — surprisingly — aren’t sources of this power. It’s not the subject or the content, although subject and content that is inherently interesting or dramatic can go a long way toward helping a book be interesting or dramatic. It’s not timeliness, although I’m always happy to spend time with a book that has something to say to the present moment. And it’s not the events the book offers, although I’m drawn to a book that offers a series of interesting events.

“Seven minutes of terror”: The secret story of the Mars rover landing

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 00:02:00 +0000

The next major event in Curiosity's journal would be the landing. The center of the action on Earth would be JPL, where the signals would be received from the deep-space network antennae.

In comparison with the launch, landing on Mars is statistically far more risky. The Atlas V that powered the Curiosity rover up and away from Earth had a better than 95 percent success rate. In contrast, there had only been a total of six successful landings on Mars out of the many attempts by the United States, the Soviet Union, and the European Space Agency—a rate of well under 50 percent. NASA had not had any failures with its three Mars landings in the past decade, but the risk of crashing was formidable, and much greater than NASA would like to admit.

“Paleofantasy”: Stone Age delusions

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 22:00:00 +0000

Four years ago, biology professor Marlene Zuk was attending a conference on evolution and diseases of modern environments. She sat in on a presentation by Loren Cordain, author of "The Paleo Diet" and a leading guru of the current craze for emulating the lifestyles of our Stone-Age ancestors. Cordain pronounced several foods (bread, rice, potatoes) to be the cause of a fatal condition in people carrying certain genes. Intrigued, Zuk stood up and asked Cordain why this genetic inability to digest so many common foods had persisted. "Surely it would have been selected out of the population," she suggested.

Cordain, who has a Ph.D in exercise physiology, assured Zuk that human beings had not had time to adapt to foods that only became staples with the advent of agriculture. "It's only been ten thousand years," he explained. Zuk's response: "Plenty of time." He looked at her blankly, and she repeated: "Plenty of time." Zuk goes on to write, "we never resolved our disagreement."

“Wave”: A family vacation turns into the worst kind of nightmare

Sun, 03 Mar 2013 23:00:00 +0000

The first time Sonali Deraniyagala heard the word "tsunami," she was shut up in a darkened bedroom in her aunt's house in Colombo, Sri Lanka. It was 2004, and the wave had just taken her parents, her husband and her two young sons.

Deraniyagala had been vacationing with her family in a seaside hotel near a national park when, through a terrace window, she saw the sea rising rapidly past its familiar bounds. With her husband, Steve, she grabbed Vikram, 8, and Malli, 5, and rushed out the door and up the drive. They jumped in a passing jeep, but soon the wave overwhelmed even that. The last time Deraniyagala saw her husband's face, he was looking in horror at something over her shoulder. Then the jeep overturned, and for Deraniyagala the next few hours were chaos, violence and filthy water, the tsunami tossing her miles inland and then sucking her out again. Just before she would have been swept out to sea, she grabbed an overhanging branch and felt the ground materialize under her feet. She never saw her family again.

National Book Critics Circle’s 2013 awards announced

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 03:40:00 +0000

The 2013 winners of the National Book Critics Circle were announced on Thursday night at the New School in New York's West Village. Two of the recipients were National Book Award finalists — fiction winner and debut novelist Ben Fountain, for his novel "Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk" (read Laura Miller's review — one of Salon's top 10 books of the year) about the Iraq war, and veteran writer Robert A. Caro, for the fourth installment of his LBJ biographical series, "The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson" (read Erik Nelson's review). Below, the full list of award recipients.

Recipients of the National Book Critic Circle Awards for 2013

Poetry
D. A. Powell, "Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys" (Graywolf Press)

Is the priesthood a failed tradition?

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 20:00:00 +0000

It takes a long time to write and publish a book, so Garry Wills certainly could not have predicted that his newest, “Why Priests?: A Failed Tradition,” would arrive at precisely the moment in history in which many thoughtful Catholics must be asking the same question.

If you’re expecting a polemic, you might get a quiet one, but you won’t get much in the way of bombast or grandstanding. Wills is a scholar, and his opposition is rooted in a position firmly inside the church. The book is dedicated to the memory of a priest, Henri de Lubac, S.J., and it begins with a long appreciation of the priests Wills has known and loved in a professional lifetime of reading and writing about religion, which itself began in a Jesuit seminary, where Wills studied for five years in hopes of becoming a priest.

This brief memoiristic opening quickly gives way to a historical account of the rise to prominence and power of the priestly class in the Roman Catholic tradition, which begins with the first generation of a priestless movement that hadn’t yet begun to call itself Christianity, and it is here that the reviewer of the audiobook edition begins to experience a special pleasure. So often the better audiobooks get their traction and build their momentum through their narrative qualities — the urgency of scene-making, the building tension of information that the listener is gaining alongside the speaker, the carefully modulated rising and falling of carefully shaped juxtapositions of events.

My awful past keeps me from writing

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 01:00:00 +0000

Dear Reader,

This letter is super-long even by my standards. In comparison, the reply is not actually so very long but it is all sort of one long uninterrupted piece, which I hope you will examine structurally and see how I am connecting clauses with semicolons and looping recursions and looping recursions and looping recursions, trying to create an unbroken thread even as it meanders and loops and recurs and recurs and loops and recurs.

Hi Cary.

I'm a big fan of your work. I read all your new advice pieces because, regardless of how I relate to the letter-writer, I always find a ubiquitous nugget of beauty and hope in your responses. When I saw your call for more creativity-related letters, I felt like this was my moment to try and write to you myself.

I'm 28 years old. I've been reading since age 2 and began writing not long after that. I love it with all my heart; it is the craft that defines me. I was determined to be the youngest novelist and be published at age 13, and while I did indeed finish a murder mystery novel (I use the term loosely) by then, of course it was not in any condition to be published. But ambitions for my writing have been high since I can remember. And more than that, no matter what trouble I've faced in my life — and I've faced quite a bit — writing has always been there for me, to save me. But suddenly it's becoming difficult in a new and frankly traumatic way.

“The Myth of Persecution”: Early Christians weren’t persecuted

Sun, 24 Feb 2013 21:00:00 +0000

In the immediate aftermath of the Columbine High School massacre, a modern myth was born. A story went around that one of the two killers asked one of the victims, Cassie Bernall, if she believed in God. Bernall reportedly said "Yes" just before he shot her. Bernall's mother wrote a memoir, titled "She Said Yes: The Unlikely Martyrdom of Cassie Bernall," a tribute to her daughter's courageous Christian faith. Then, just as the book was being published, a student who was hiding near Bernall told journalist Dave Cullen that the exchange never happened.

Although Candida Moss' new book, "The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom," is about the three centuries following the death of Jesus, she makes a point of citing this modern-day parallel. What Bernall truly said and did in the moments before her death absolutely matters, Moss asserts, if we are going to hold her up as a "martyr." Yet misconceptions and misrepresentations can creep in so soon. The public can get the story wrong even in this highly mediated and thoroughly reported age -- and do so despite the presence among us of living eyewitnesses. So what, then, to make of the third-hand, heavily revised, agenda-laden and anachronistic accounts of Christianity's original martyrs?

Truman Capote’s greatest lie

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 12:45:00 +0000

Questions about the accuracy of "In Cold Blood," the seminal 1966 "nonfiction novel" by Truman Capote, are nothing new; they bubbled up as soon as the book was published. Capote himself — who always maintained that "In Cold Blood" was "immaculately factual" — made thousands of changes (some grammatical, some factual) to the true-crime classic between its initial four-part-serial publication in the New Yorker and its appearance in book form the next year. His sources and critics have challenged aspects of the text ranging from the price of a horse to whether or not a graveside conversation that appears in the book's concluding pages ever occurred.

Two recent developments, however, shed a particularly troubling light on Capote's account of the 1959 murders of four members of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kan. They pertain to the search for the crime's perpetrators, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, and to an additional four murders they are suspected of committing. In the first development, the Wall Street Journal recently reported on a dispute over records of the investigation. These documents, currently in the possession of Ron Nye, were taken home years ago by his late father, Harold Nye, one of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation detectives assigned to the case.

Philip Roth’s retirement lesson

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 12:39:00 +0000

Last July, Philip Roth, the author of 26 novels and one collection of short stories, told a French interviewer that he had not written a word of fiction in three years and that he did not intend to write fiction again. Roth is 79. He told the French interviewer that he no longer felt “the fanaticism to write” that had driven him for close to six decades, and that he was “tired” of “all the work” that writing demanded. Not only would he no longer write fiction, he said, but he also would no longer read it. (Four months later, in an interview with The New York Times, Roth confessed to having recently read a novel by Louise Erdrich — under the covers, as it were — while adding that most of his reading now was in fact nonfiction.) He said he didn’t feel “any sadness” about his decision. When the French interviewer expressed dismay and wondered if Roth might not take up novel writing again, Roth said that if he were to write another book, it would “very probably be a failure,” and “Who needs to read another mediocre book?” Roth didn’t say how he would “fill the hours” (to use a phrase used mordantly by “the most famous literary ascetic in America,” Roth’s E.I. Lonoff in The Ghost Writer), other than to note that he would help his biographer, Blake Bailey, sort out the facts of his life. (Bailey is the author of a critically acclaimed biography of John Cheever, whom Roth refers to in the French interview as a friend.) It’s hard to imagine the retired Roth taking a cruise in the Caribbean, participating in the onboard karaoke nights — almost as hard as it is to imagine him tweeting — but it is possible to picture him watching sports on TV, especially baseball. In the early 1970s, he wrote a novel about baseball — he called it The Great American Novel, a title that is 95 percent ironic and five percent dead serious — and it is, among other things, the work of a baseball fan. “What,” asks the narrator of this novel, “are the consolations of philosophy or the affirmations of religion beside an afternoon’s rich meal of doubles, triples, and home runs?”

“Give Me Everything You Have”: Stalked!

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 23:00:00 +0000

With its eerie, pristine prose, James Lasdun's fiction distills the anxieties of contemporary life to their mythic core. In his remarkable 2002 novel, "The Horned Man," an academic estranged from his wife goes quietly mad while serving on his college's sexual harassment committee, imagining that the department's most legendary womanizer is secretly living in his office and sabotaging his life. Take a writer like this, one who specializes in the surreal, inward spiraling of paranoia, and make him the target of a clever stalker: It sounds like the premise of a James Lasdun novel, right? However, "Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked," Lasdun's new book, is not a novel, but a memoir.

Death of an American sniper

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 18:00:00 +0000

"I am not a fan of politics," wrote Chris Kyle, the 38-year-old former Navy SEAL sniper who was shot and killed with a friend at a Texas firing range on Saturday. Yet, in his best-selling memoir, "American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History" -- originally published last year and currently experiencing a sales bump in the aftermath of Kyle's death -- the commando also wrote, "I like war." The problem, as Kyle would have known if he'd read his Carl von Clausewitz, is that the two aren't separable; war, as Clauswitz wrote, is the continuation of politics by other means.

Chances are, though, that Kyle never heard of Clausewitz; certainly there's nothing in "American Sniper" to suggest that he ever thought very deeply about his service, or wanted to. The red-blooded superficiality of his memoir is surely the quality that made it appealing to so many readers. Well, that and Kyle's proficiency at his chosen specialty: He boasted of having killed over 250 people during his four deployments as a sniper in Iraq. While Kyle’s physical courage and fidelity to his fellow servicemen were unquestionable, his steadfast imperviousness to any nuance, subtlety or ambiguity, and his lack of imagination and curiosity, seem particularly notable in light of the circumstances of his death. They were also all-too-emblematic of the blustering, tragically misguided self-confidence of the George W. Bush years.