Salon.com > Our Picks: Books

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.

Must do’s: What we like this week

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 14:00:00 +0000

BOOKS

Laura Miller recommends the memoir of Alexandra Aldrich, a descendent of the prominent Astor family, which provides a glimpse into a less privileged, less happy childhood than one would expect:

In premise alone, “The Astor Orphan” sounds like some delicious children’s novel, the kind of thing you’d gobble a dozen times over by the age of 8. In reality it’s a mournful, curious tale of an anxious child’s longing for security. Aldrich, who kept a diary from an early age, apparently sticks closely to it; her book has a halting, episodic rhythm. It lacks the fluency of truly accomplished storytelling, but the story it tells is so extraordinary, and Aldrich’s tone is so baldly honest, that the reader’s attention will not flag.

Must do’s: What we like this week

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 14:00:00 +0000

BOOKS

Laura Miller was transfixed by Wendy Moore’s “How to Create the Perfect Wife,” which exlores the hidden life of 18th century abolitionist Thomas Day. Day would have been considered a catch during his time -- except that he didn't believe in love, and surreptitiously groomed a wife:

Throughout history, men convinced that women exist solely to serve their needs have been flummoxed to discover that women see things otherwise. Day, however, believed that he had reason and Rousseau on his side. If he could not find an already-grown woman who possessed every quality he required in a spouse, why not make one to order? In 1769, he visited a foundling home and, pretending to be seeking maidservant apprentices for a married friend, secured two girls, aged 12 and 11. His aim: educating and training them to meet his precise specifications in a wife, then marrying the one who best suited him. He even renamed his experimental subjects: Sabrina and Lucretia.

Must do’s: What we like this week

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 14:00:00 +0000

BOOKS

Laura Miller was impressed by Kate Atkinson's "Life After Life," in which protagonist Ursula Todd "lives any number of lives in the course of the book," à la Bill Murray in "Groundhog Day":

As a result, “Life After Life” runs through several courses of Ursula’s story until each comes to its terminus, then the novel starts over with a different one. Perhaps this sounds monotonous, like some hellish video game in which you’ve got to repeat a level again and again to make it to the next. That’s not the case. “Life After Life” is a hypnotic dance of causality and chance, in which Ursula makes genuine progress. We see how a meek Ursula’s life plays out when one of her boorish older brother’s friends casually rapes her in the back stairway, and then we get the version in which she’s seized with a powerful urge to clock him the minute he gets fresh. Each iteration shows her to be more self-possessed, more in charge of her own life (as the cliché goes) — but that doesn’t necessarily lead to a “better” outcome. Meanwhile, Ursula moves toward that inevitable time-traveler imperative, the one that gave its name to a “Doctor Who” episode: “Let’s Kill Hitler.”

Must Do’s: What we like this week

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 14:00:00 +0000

BOOKS

[caption id="attachment_13256368" align="alignleft" width="620" caption=" "]

For anyone interested in epic adventure tales, Laura Miller recommends “Between Man and Beast: An Unlikely Explorer, the Evolution Debates, and the African Adventure That Took the Victorian World by Storm,” a study of Paul du Chaillu, an explorer whose remarkable journey is part Charles Darwin, part Indiana Jones:

"This elusive, gallant and endearing man was born on a date and in a place unknown, to a mother who has never been identified. His story, as told by Reel, is both a tale of plucky self-invention and an ironic reflection on the sometimes ugly inner workings of the scientific world."

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.

Must do’s: What we like this week

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 14:00:00 +0000

BOOKS

Laura Miller bites into "Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us About Sex, Diet, and How We Live," by evolutionary biologist Marlene Zuk, who debunks the myth of the caveman diet:

Why are we so intent on establishing how paleolithic people ate, exercised, coupled up and raised their kids? That’s a question Zuk considers only in passing, but she hits the nail pretty solidly on the head … Even if we wanted to live like cavemen, Zuk points out (noting that the desire to do so somehow never seems to extend to moving into mud huts), we couldn’t. In reality, we don’t have their bodies, and don’t live in their world. Even the animals and plants we eat have changed beyond recognition from their paleolithic ancestors. It turns out we’re stuck being us.

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.

Barbara Pym gets rediscovered — again

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

It sometimes seems there are two schools of enjoyable fiction. In one, the fate of the world hangs in the balance: There's running and shooting on the low-brow end of this spectrum, and scheming and intrigue higher up. In the other school, the stakes are low -- in fact, that's a key to its appeal. Making this latter sort of fiction work is infinitely more difficult, but the author who pulls it off, especially if he or she is funny, can command a fearsomely loyal readership. Barbara Pym is one of those authors.

Born a solicitor's daughter in the West Midlands of England in 1913, educated at Oxford, serving in the Women's Royal Naval Service during World War II and working for much of the rest of her life at the International African Institute in London, Pym was a quintessential middle-class Englishwoman, much like her idol, Jane Austen. Like Austen, Pym wrote comedies of manners about the members of her own class, modeling the characters on people she knew. Her novels are populated by vicar's wives, dotty unmarried sisters living in rural villages, holders of mid-level office jobs in sleepy London concerns and assorted anthropologists (based on the ones she met at the institute).

Must Do’s: What we like this week

Sat, 09 Mar 2013 15:00:00 +0000

BOOKS

Laura Miller was deeply moved by Sonali Deraniyagal's incredible, spare memoir, “Wave,” about losing her parents, husband and children in the 2004 tsunami during a family vacation:

Deraniyagala’s account of this nightmare, but the tsunami itself only takes up a handful of this spare, radiant book’s pages. The rest is what came after, months in that darkened room contemplating suicide, then a period of getting drunk every day and conducting a demented campaign of harassment against the Dutch family to whom her brother rented her parents’ house. Deraniyagala, an economist at the University of London and Columbia University, had been living with Steve and the boys in London, but she wasn’t able to set foot in their English house for two years.

Back to the Round Table

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 20:00:00 +0000

There was a time when rereading seemed a nearly unimaginable luxury to me; with one book review to write per week, plus miscellaneous new books that need to be checked out on top of that, I just didn't have the time, or the eye-power. I'd long yearned to revisit what I remember as one of the most beautiful books I read in my youth, T.H. White's "The Once and Future King." Originally published as four separate novels (the first, "The Sword in the Stone," was animated by Disney) with a later add-on title, "The Book of Merlin," this is an unusual epic, the story of King Arthur and his Round Table -- material that resonates through Western culture -- yet in White's hands the story is also intimate and even humble.

How sad to think I might never get the chance to revisit it! (The list of older books I plan to read once I "retire" is probably longer than the list of books I've already read.) Then I came across the audiobook, an option made irresistible by the fact that it is narrated by Neville Jason, whose sensitive rendering of Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past" has helped me get past the famous second-book hump in that series of novels. The ideal place to revisit White's masterpiece: Lying in bed in the dark at night, with my iPhone set to turn itself off in a half hour. Soon, however, I found myself squeezing in bits of listening as I waited for the bus or baked a friend's birthday cake.

“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.

Must Do’s: What we like this week

Sat, 02 Mar 2013 15:00:00 +0000

BOOKS

Laura Miller dug into Candida Moss' scholarly work on Christianity's obsession with martyrdom, titled "The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom." She writes:

"Moss is thorough, strives for clarity and is genuinely fired up in her concern for the influence of the myth of martyrdom on Western societies. 'The idea of the persecuted church is almost entirely the invention of the 4th century and later,' she writes. This was, significantly, a period during which the church had become 'politically secure,' thanks to Constantine. Yet, instead of providing a truthful account of Christianity’s early years, the scholars and clerics of the fourth century cranked out tales of horrific, systemic violence. These stories were subtly (and not so subtly) used as propaganda against heretical ideas or sects. They also made appealingly gruesome entertainment for believers who were, personally, fairly safe; Moss likens this to contemporary suburbanites reveling in a horror film."

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.

How Christopher Hitchens proved that nothing is sacred

Fri, 14 Dec 2012 15:25:00 +0000

In the foreword to "The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice," Christopher Hitchens imagined the question he invited by writing the book: “Who would be so base as to pick on her, a wizened, shriveled old lady, well stricken in years, who has consecrated her entire life to the needy and the destitute?”

The short version of Hitchens’s answer: Me.

His longer version: The implied question “Is nothing sacred?” must always be answered “with a stoical ‘No.’”

This fierce stance was central to Hitchens’s work, and now that he has been dead for a year, and Mother Teresa has been dead for 15 years, the reissue of "The Missionary Position" as an audiobook is less an opportunity to revisit the history of their disagreement (his explicit, hers implicit) than it is an opportunity to remember the value of Hitchens’s great pugnacious willingness to examine, in cold detail, the things the culture has enshrined, and to “scorn to use the fear of death to coerce and flatter the poor.”

“The $60,000 Dog”: Animal attraction

Sun, 18 Nov 2012 22:00:00 +0000

To judge by recent publishing trends, the great proliferation of authors these days can be attributed to the animals — sometimes cats, occasionally the odd duck, but mostly dogs, and badly behaved ones at that — who go around saving their lives. These rescues, alas, consist of nothing so exciting as pulling the writer from a burning building or arriving in the midst of a blizzard carrying a little wooden barrel of brandy. Instead, the wayward pooches and mischievous felines stick to figurative life-saving — in the form of teaching the author to open his heart to love again or to embrace familial responsibility or to appreciate the beauties of the imperfect.

A desire to avoid this tedious (but by no means flagging) genre might keep some readers from Lauren Slater's new book, a linked collection of autobiographical essays about the relationship between people and animals. Two signals that this one is something different: the title, "The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals," which (rightly) suggests that Slater will be getting at some of the more difficult and ambiguous aspects of America's pet fixation, and Slater's track record. She has published six books, all but one of them nonfiction, and in each one she excavates the prickliest roots of subjects such as anti-depressants, pregnancy, psychological experiments, mental illness and the unreliability of the memoir form itself. "Okay, girls," says a drill-sergeant-like riding instructor at a camp she attended as a girl, "Slater has one of her typical profound and provocative questions." Yes she does; she always does.

“The Adventures of Cancer Bitch”: Memoir of a sassy survivor

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 14:22:00 +0000

“I love pink M&M’s,” S.L. Wisenberg writes, near the beginning of her diaristic memoir “The Adventures of Cancer Bitch.” “I eat them every day. That’s all I eat. If I eat enough of them my cancer will go away. Won’t it? Isn’t that what they promise?”

It’s a virtuosic half-paragraph, a feat of tonal control that is amplified by the pleasingly plainspoken Texan almost-drawl of audiobook narrator Jennifer Teague, whose delivery radiates the complicated stew of virtues Wisenberg’s prose offers all at once: Sassy intelligence, social conscience, humor, feminist willfulness and indignation at the stream of reductive corporate can-do logic and self-help wall-poster language that patients must endure daily alongside their cancer.

The audiobook begins not with an author note, but with a section titled “About the Bitch,” a name chosen not for the author’s bitchy qualities, but rather because the blog that preceded it “should be called Cancer Something, and Babe was too young and Vixen was already taken.” Then, this news: “No animals were harmed in the production of this book except a few mice, and they were home invaders.”

Chabon on race, sex, Obama: “I never wanted to tell the story of two guys in a record store”

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 15:25:00 +0000

If you’ve ever lived in Berkeley, Calif., that much-ridiculed college town on the eastern shores of San Francisco Bay, or even visited the place, you probably have highly specific associations with Telegraph Avenue, a historic street of political protests and retail commerce (legal and otherwise) that dead-ends against the University of California campus at Sather Gate. Michael Chabon’s new novel is pointedly not about that Telegraph Avenue, and its characters have no relationship to the university campus or to the 1960s explosion of left-wing activism that made Berkeley internationally famous – and, briefly, in my childhood, the locus of martial law as ordered by the governor of California, Ronald Reagan.

Chabon’s “Telegraph Avenue” calls our attention, literally and figuratively, to the other end of the street, where Telegraph crosses the city line and becomes the main drag of the Temescal district, a racially and economically mixed neighborhood in northwest Oakland. That’s where Archy Stallings, a 36-year-old African-American Gulf War vet who is the novel’s central character, and his Jewish partner Nat Jaffe (whose background resembles Chabon’s own) are not so slowly running a vintage vinyl emporium called Brokeland Records into the ground. It’s the summer of 2004, and a wealthy former NFL star and Oakland native, Gibson “G-Bad” Goode, is planning to open an immense new retail-entertainment complex – called, wonderfully, the “Dogpile Thang” – four blocks away, applying the coup de grace to Archy and Nat’s failing business.

The best nonfiction of 2011

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 12:00:00 +0000

The book business may be undergoing tectonic changes brought on by the booming popularity of e-books, the consolidating power of Amazon.com and the wobbly state of bricks-and-mortar bookstores, but books themselves are better than ever.

The 10 best books of 2011 (five fiction, five nonfiction) feature characters ranging from empresses to impostors, settings as far flung as Amazonian jungles and secret Antarctic cities, themes as compelling as love, race, class, art, revolution and the very nature of communication itself. (We revealed the top fiction titles yesterday.) At at time when the economic horizon often seems to be contracting, the curiosity and imagination of authors know no bounds. It's amazing how far you can travel and how much you can discover, all for the modest price of a book.

2011's BEST NONFICTION