![[Metroactive Books]](gifs/books468.gif)
[ Books Central | Metroactive Central ]
[ New Reviews: A-H | I-P | Q-Z ]
Accelerando by Charles Stross
The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks
All Yesterdays' Parties: The Velvet Underground in Print, 1966-1971 edited by Clinton Heylin
The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson: Secret Agents, Private I edited by Meredith Tromble
The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq by George Packer
Bangkok Tattoo
by John Burdett
Best American Erotica 2005 edited by Susie Bright
The Best of the Spirit by Will Eisner
Beyond the Naked Eye: Details From the National Gallery by Jill Dunkerton and Rachel Billinge
The Botanist and the Vintner: How Wine Was Saved for the World by Christy Campbell
Buffalo Bill in Bologna: The Americanization of the World, 1869-1922 by Robert W. Rydell and Rob Kroes
Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation by Jeff Chang The Challenge to Power: Money, Investing and Democracy by John Harrington Cities of the World: A History in Maps by Peter Whitfield
Come On In!: New Poems by Charles Bukowski
The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design by Leonard Susskind
Counterculture Through the Ages: From Abraham to Acid House by Ken Goffman Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights by Kenji Yoshino
Crap Jobs: 100 Tales Of Workplace Hell edited by Dan Kieran
Curry: A Tale of Cooks & Conquerors by Lizzie Collingham
Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing That Divided Gilded Age America by James Green
Descent: The Heroic Discovery of the Abyss by Brad Matsen
Desert Queen by Janet Wallach
Desertion by Keith Lovegrove A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture and Conquest in the East, 1750-1850 by Maya Jasanoff The 8:55 to Baghdad by Andres Eames Everybody Into the Pool: True Tales by Beth Lisick Festivus: The Holiday for the Rest of Us by Allen Salkin
The Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit Finding Freedom: Writings from Death Row by Jarvis Jay Masters A Fire to Win by John Lombardo First and Fifteenth: Pop Art Short Stories by Steve Powers The First Lady of Hollywood: A Biography of Louella O. Parsons by Samantha Barbas
Flashman on The March by George MacDonald Fraser Food in Painting: From the Renaissance To the Present by Kenneth Bendiner From Asahi to Zebras by Ralph M. Pearce
Georges Braque: A Life by Alex Danchev A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan by Michael Kazin Going Postal by Mark Ames The Grail Bird: Hot on the Trail of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker by Tim Gallagher The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East by Robert Fisk
Greetings From the Salton Sea: Folly and Intervention in the Southern California Landscape, 1905-2005 by Kim Stringfellow Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk Here Is Where We Meet by John Berger High Holy Adventure: Spirits, Shamans & Mediums I Know and Love by Randy Fuller The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova Hugs: Thoughtlead by Mike Ogilvie
![[whitespace]](http://metroactive.com/gifs/whiteline2.gif){kind=small}
Reviewer key
(JF) = John Freeman
(MSG) = Michael S. Gant
(RK) = Rick Kleffel
(RvB) = Richard von Busack
Full text review.
Full column.
Iain M. Banks offers up some fascinating ideas and runs with them in his latest stand-alone science fiction novel. One of the true pleasures of reading space opera is the reader's slowly unfolding understanding of the universe created by the author. Banks lays out and layers his presentation of a civilized universe with consummate skill. The Algebraist manages just the right combination of "What the hell?" and "Oh, my God!" revelations as to how things work. Banks knows when to zoom in and when to pan out; he goes from microscopic to telescopic as the situation demands. The plot, which naturally finds protagonist Fassin Taak in a race to prevent the end of life as he knows it, grips the reader in the opening and moves at a steady, entertaining clip. But where Banks really shines is in his ability to evoke subtle, satiric swipes at the world we know within the universe he creates. Great characters and witty dialogue are the reasons. Banks' best creation is the race he calls the Dwellers: ancient creatures who experience time much more slowly than humans. They provide space slapstick utterly unlike the broad satire readers are used to in humorous science fiction. The humor comes out of character and dialogue; the satire out of intricately conceived societal relationships. Banks doesn't stint on the awe and wonder however, nor does he hold back from full-scale space battles that have yet another twist of imagination and invention. The set pieces in this novel are exciting, visually grand and quite inventive. If you've not read Banks, or any space opera, then The Algebraist is a fine place to begin. It successfully presents readers with nothing less than a universe—with a few well-placed laughs. (Night Shade Books; 434 pages; $24.95) (RK)
Full text review.
Full column.
Before she took over Narnia, Tilda Swinton was burnishing her art-world chops in two groundbreaking experimental films by Bay Area artist Lynn Hershman Leeson: Conceiving Ada (1997) and Teknolust (2002). In the former, Swinton plays Ada, Countess of Lovelace, a 19th-century inventor who designed a mechanical calculator that was a precursor to the computer; in the latter, she stars as Dr. Rosetta Stone and the three color-coded automatons fashioned from the good doctor's DNA. The films' innovative use of computer-aided images and real-time blue-screen backgrounds mark the culmination of Hershman Leeson's career as a leading "new media" artist. Long before DVDs, the artist pioneered site-specific installations (including the early-'70s Dante Hotel, a room in a seedy San Francisco hotel complete with two wax dummies and the artifacts of their imaginary lives, open 24/7 for nine months until the police were called by someone who thought it was a real murder scene), interactive videodisc projects, touch-screen art pieces and robotic, networked sculptures. As just one indication of Hershman Leeson's prescience, in the '70s she created a fully fleshed doppelgänger, Roberta Breitmore, long before Cindy Sherman's "self-as-fake" photo portraits and Laurie Long's Dating Surveillance Project (see this year at the San Jose Museum of Art). As preserved in photo-documents, Roberta became a virtual San Franciscan, complete with a driver's license, a checking account and unwitting roommates and real-life adventures, among them an encounter with a prostitution ring. The book includes useful historical details about Hershman Leeson's many projects, a dozen critical essays about her influence on today's cyberartists and, best of all, an accompanying DVD that gives the reader a sampling of the artist's visual strategies, including Swinton in triplicate. (UC Press; 230 pages, plus DVD; $24.95 paper) (MSG)
Full text review.
Full text review.
Full text review.
Full column.
Will Eisner's name ought to be thought of in quotation marks, as Walt Disney's is. Many of his 22 stories from 1940¬‚50 are the unmistakable yet unsigned work of Wally Wood, Jack Cole and Joe Kubert. Not the least of the innovations that Eisner borrowed from cinema was the blending of talents under one logo. And yet the Will Eisner studio produced some of the most creative work these collected artists did. It was all tied together by the Spirit: Denny Colt, a seemingly dead detective who puts on a turquoise-blue domino mask and baffles Central City. Although he takes a lot of bullets, the Spirit conducts himself like a character who is aware he is in a comic book. He is sometimes a patsy, particularly with women. (Eisner's sirens are modeled on Veronica Lake, Bette Davis or Hedy Lamarr, the last in the person of the French-accented P'Gelle, named, sans doute, after the prostitutes' hangout Place Pigalle.) The seven-page tales are sometimes affable, macabre, breezy or silly. Peter Schjeldahl 's uninformed piece in The New Yorker dismissed Eisner as "melodramatic," but melodrama was only one of the styles Eisner explored. The innovative use of typography and color, the explosive splash-page titles, the negative space and silence—all were borrowed by other cartoonists. It seems like even a Worst of the Spirit collection would be full of the technique that made Eisner who he was. (DC Comics; 185 pages; $14.99 paper) (RvB)
Full column.
Unfortunately, most of what we know about great paintings must be gleaned from reproductions. A photo can show us the composition of a masterwork, but it is no substitute for the up-close scrutiny that a museum-goer enjoys. This small book makes up some of the gap by reproducing details in close-up of Renaissance paintings in the collection of England's National Gallery—including works by Raphael, Fra Angelico and Cranach. These reveal nearly invisible background touches, like a miniature rabbit lurking in a grandiose biblical scene by Andrea Mantegna. Elsewhere, it is possible to study precision hairline brush strokes or the application of droplets of paint to create the impression of gold threads in garments. At their most extreme, these magnified images pass beyond representation all the way to an abstract world of cracks, ripples and squiggles—unintended but pleasing aesthetic byproducts. The book contains a somewhat overly elaborate identification scheme for matching the details to the paints whence they came. (Yale University Press; 80 pages; $16.95 cloth)
Review/article.
Full column.
At the turn of the 21st century, we think of globalization as an economic flood tide leveling out national and ethnic differences for the benefit of corporations. In Buffalo Bill in Bologna, historians Robert Rydell and Robert Kroes trace the trend all the way back to the export of American mass culture at the turn of the 20th century. From the PR coups of P.T. Barnum to traveling Wild West shows, from silent movies to picture postcards, American values and myths were marketed to the world—in other words, Charlie Chaplin paved the way for Ronald McDonald. At times, Rydell and Kroes' arguments can be reductionist, implying that disparate incidents added up to an opiate-dispensing conspiracy. But the authors do admit that in many instances (especially popular music), consumers actively subverted supposedly passive entertainments. The analysis can be heavy sledding, but the particulars are often fascinating, including a rundown of late-19th-century world's fairs and an account of Buffalo Bill's warm welcome at the Vatican in 1890. (University of Chicago Press; 209 pages; $26 cloth) (MSG)
Review/article.
Review/article.
Full column.
Google Maps brings us closer to each other's backyards than is healthy for the penumbral right of privacy, but there is no aesthetic substitute for
the magnificent hand-colored maps of the 15th through the early 19th century. Peter Whitfield's gorgeous coffee-table
book presents a generous helping of such cartographic gems to study the growth of 64 cities (plus two imaginary metropolises). The cities surveyed include the obvious—Rome, Paris, London—and the quirky: the geometrical fortified city of Palmanova; the severe, religiously driven grid of Salt Lake City; the haunted ruins of St. Andrew's, a Scottish university town "on the way to nowhere" that flourished in the 16th century before "entering a period of slumber" that caught the attention of romanticizing travelers. Whitfield's succinct lessons in urban design are well worth reading, although the temptation is to keep leafing through these magnificent maps, until you end up at a circa 1550 bird's-eye panorama of Venice, with every significant church and building depicted in perspective view in a "precious, jewel-like city, floating on a rich sea of azure." (UC Press; 208 pages; $39.95) (MSG)
Full column.
For a man who spent a good deal of his writing life contemplating his nether regions, hardscrabble West Coast poet and dog-racing aficionado Charles Bukowski has had an appropriately virile afterlife. Twelve years after his death, the archive of poems he selected for posthumous publication continues to cough up books, the latest of which is Come On In! Here are all the old Bukowski concerns: the flatulence and falseness of the so-called real world; the beady-eyed self-loathing that develops out of the mere fact of rubbing up against it; and the slow way Bukowski climbed his way out of these depths by writing. "I thought,/ Jesus Christ," he writes of reading a Truman Capote story, "if this is what they/ want,/ from now on/ I might as well write for/ the rats and the spiders/ and the air and just for/myself." This is, of course, something of a posture, but Come on In! shows again just how effective a Pied Piper it made of Bukowski. In a world of fakes and frauds, he was the voice you could trust—a Howard Stern of the poetry world when satellite radio was just a gleam in some inventor's eye. But there is an anecdotal nowness to his poems that never seems to age. When Bukowski writes of shuffling off to a cafe to talk books with his low-down friends, of hunching over his desk to work, it feels as if we are right there watching. In today's environment of willful poetic obscurity, this is refreshing and terribly charming. Like Kurt Vonnegut, Bukowski reminds us we can all still be young at heart, true to our own best selves. (Ecco; 277 pages; $27.50 cloth) (JF)
Full column.
To date, the debate over intelligent design has focused on evolution, but physicists have their own version of the controversy—the Anthropic Principle, which states that the laws of physics are precisely set up so that life is possible. A decimal point here or there, and we wouldn't be around to peer through telescopes and study the universe. According to Stanford University physicist Leonard Susskind in his new book for the lay reader, a host of extraordinary "fine tunings" in various physical constants (especially the cosmological constant, which governs the expansion of the universe and which is damned close to, but not quite, zero) have resulted in just the right conditions to create ... us. Such a conclusion rankles physicists like Susskind, who prefer to interpret the universe as a product of mathematical inevitability and not an unknowable intentionality. Susskind, a pioneer in the field of quantum physics known as string theory, offers a way out of dilemma. In brief (Susskind does his best to simply some dauntingly complex processes), string theory generates a multitude of solutions to the equations governing the universe. Extrapolating from this mathematical cornucopia, Susskind posits that "our" universe is but one "infinitesimal pocket of a stupendous megaverse"—i.e., just one possible set of physical laws out of an infinitude of possibilities. Accepting this thesis, it is easy to imagine that statistics alone will allow for a few universes where physicists and fundamentalists both exist: "There is no magic, no supernatural designer: just the laws of large numbers." Of course, to work, Susskind's theory needs some way to prove that those other universes exist and aren't just doodles on a blackboard. That requires a form of communication that can cross the point of no return defined by the speed of light. And with this tantalizing suggestion, Susskind ends on the hopeful expectation that experiments and observations will eventually catch up to theory. (Little Brown; 403 pages; $24.95 cloth) (MSG)
Full text review.
Full column.
According to Yale Law School dean Kenji Yoshino, the civil rights movement made enormous strides for equality, but it has stalled. That's because the law cannot protect men and women from being forced to "cover" their differences. The term comes from a 1963 book by sociologist Erving Goffman, which Yoshino discovered when he was first coming out as a gay man. "Passing," Goffman argued, involved simply toning down the visibility of a trait. "Covering," he wrote, happened when "persons who are ready to admit possession of a stigma ... may nonetheless make a great effort to keep the stigma from looming large." This profound and moving book describes how this subtle form of discrimination works from the outside in, beginning with Yoshino's own experiences as a law student and then university professor, who was told that things would work out for him if he was a "homosexual professional" rather than a "professional homosexual." He then moves on to legal arguments, showing how civil rights legislation apologizes for difference, thereby undercutting its advocacy. Yoshino is a gorgeous writer and a keen thinker, whose forays into his own past often do as much to elucidate this concept as his legal arguments. In this fashion, Covering embodies its author's unspoken goal: to be able to speak out without fear, with pride even. (Random House; 282 pages; $24.95 cloth)
Full column.
Take it from this ex-midnight shift file clerk, telemarketer of defective Bic pens, industrial-boiler asbestos stripper and apartment manager of a complex where domestic violence was everyone's favorite sport—there are a load of crap jobs out there. England's Idler magazine anthologizes 100 wretched examples with personal memoirs. Recounted here are the "death-metal" odors of an old-folks home, the Glengarry Glen Ross-style viciousness at a hospital-bed warehouse and the reminiscences of a human counterweight: "It's a sad state of affairs when you realize that a lump of stone could actually do a better job than you." Those who have longed for a role as maggot-farm carrion turner, nightclub toilet unblocker, phone-sex dominatrix or, worst, journalist, will learn how these occupations can make their wildest dreams come true. Included in the Yank edition are notes about the lack of vacation and benefits the average American gets compared to his cousins overseas. There is also a pounds-to-dollars conversion chart, so you can learn how little money the English reap in exchange for being submitted to waterfalls of every bodily fluid, corrosive fumes and the music of Elton John. If there is a single conclusion to be drawn, it's this: No matter how horrible the working conditions, the really crap job always depends upon really crap co-workers: the aggressive pervert, the conscienceless flake and the drunken rageball. (Harper Paperbacks; 160 pages; $11.95 paper)
(RvB)
Full column.
Lizzie Collingham's Curry contains plenty of recipes, ranging from the delectable (green coriander chutney) to the tricky (milk punch, circa 1820, using the rinds of 30 limes and plenty of arrack), but it isn't a cookbook. Instead, Collingham treats the culinary fusions of the Indian subcontinent as a form of savory cultural history. She begins her overview with the arrival of the Mogul emperors from central Asia in the 15th century, who complained about the indigenous food and introduced a taste for game meat into a civilization for which vegetarianism was a "powerful statement of one's position in ... society." The highest flourishing of the Moguls was chicken biryani, a type of aromatic rice pilau. The Portuguese colonists brought chile peppers from the West Indies, and fiery additives become a permanent part of southern India cuisine. The Raj vacillated between a taste for tinned victuals from England and a fervent embrace of Indian curries. In a chapter on chai, the author traces the fascinating story of how tea companies, faced with surpluses in the China market, blitzed the Indians with an ad campaign that turned them into tea drinkers in the early 1900s. The book ends by following Indian expats as they opened restaurants around the world, until the British themselves declared chicken tikka masala to be the national dish of Great Britain. (Oxford University Press; 315 pages; $28 cloth) (MSG)
Full column.
Thanks to unpaid overtime, we now honor the eight-hour workday mostly in the abstract. In the late 19th century, the fight for a shorter working day inflamed America's cities, especially Chicago, which was filling up with immigrant workers bearing radical ideas. In the 1860s, socialists and anarchists began railing against wage slavery. The Great Upheaval, as it was known, seemed on the verge of victory when workers struck on May 1, 1886. Three days later, on
May 4, at a rally in Haymarket Square, someone threw a bomb, and the police starting firing wildly. By the time the smoke cleared, seven police were dead or wounded (along with four onlookers), and the labor movement was in tatters. No one ever found the dynamiter, but a packed jury railroaded eight anarchists. On flimsy evidence, the anarchists were convicted simply for having delivered incendiary speeches advocating that strikers be armed and prepared to defend themselves, although no proof was forthcoming that they had any knowledge of the bomb itself. Four were eventually hung; the other three received pardons; one hung himself in prison. After a long slog of scene setting, labor historian (and proud of it) James Green embarks on a suspenseful, day-by-day, almost minute-by-minute, recounting of those hectic days in May. He follows with an equally thrilling account of the trial, a spectacle that captivated the nation. Tabloid journalists led a Nancy Grace¬‚like chorus of outrage, calling the anarchists "ungrateful hyenas" and "slavic wolves," while some prominent figures (including attorney Clarence Darrow and novelist William Dean Howells) decried the miscarriage of justice. The blanket condemnation of the protesters as violent foreigners kicked off an era of red-baiting that effectively cost Chicago "any chance for the social peace all classes desired." The labor movement didn't begin to see real gains again until the Depression. (Pantheon; 383 pages; $26.95 cloth) (MSG)
Full column.
The recent rescue of a Russian submarine demonstrated the amazing capabilities of submersibles. Seventy-five years ago, two intrepid pioneers made the first deep-sea descent in a tiny steel ball known as the Bathysphere. The submersible, attached to a metal umbilical cable on a derelict tug, carried naturalist William Beebe and engineer Otis Barton a quarter-mile below the ocean's surface near Bermuda. Beebe and Barton shivered side by side in the damp, dangerous quarters but never got along on solid ground, as author Brad Matsen relates in fascinating detail. Barton, half Beebe's age, grew up worshipping the famous scientific popularizer but became increasingly bitter as his senior partner garnered all the glory for their dives. Beebe, a household name for books like Jungle Days and Half Mile Down, craved acceptance by a scientific community that disdained his celebrityhood. Neither man got exactly what he wanted, but their plunge ignited generations of underwater exploration. (Pantheon; 286 pages; $25 cloth) (MSG)
Full column.
Some of the historical blunders alluded to by Robert Fisk in The Great War for Civilisation can be savored in detail in Janet Wallach's biography of the remarkable English traveler, writer and government adviser Gertrude Bell (1868-1926). The precocious daughter of an industrial magnate, she was the first woman to receive a First in Modern History at Oxford. Bell discovered her true calling in Mesopotamia, where she explored ancient ruins and dined in the tents of nomad chieftains. She eventually parlayed her contacts into a job with British Intelligence. After the disastrous Sykes-Picot agreement of 1917 that betrayed the Arab allies and gave Syria to the French, Bell championed the Saudi prince Faisal as the king of the new Iraq—with lots of oversight from London. Wallach is a partisan observer, always taking her subject's side, although, reading between the lines, it's clear that Bell could be a royal pain. The parts devoted to Bell's purported romantic angst (she never married but carried on passionate although unconsummated relationships with several men) read like passages from a bodice-ripper ("And then, like a starving waif suddenly handed a box of chocolates, she turned from despair to joy. Dick was coming back from Ethiopia") and do an injustice to an influential figure who had as much to do, for good and evil, with the formation of the modern Middle East as Lawrence of Arabia. (Anchor Books; 424 pages; $15.95 paper) (MSG)
Full column.
In 1899, in an East African town, an Englishman materializes from the jungle like an apparition and is cared for by a local Muslim family. Recovered from sunstroke, the mzungu ("white man") begins an affair with the sister of the man who tended him. From this cross-cultural romance, Abdulrazak Gurnah, a Zanzibar-born novelist who migrated to England in the late '60s, spins a complicated story that stretches over three generations and isn't resolved until a flurry of coincidences in an unsatisfying coda. Gurnah's real topic is colonialism; and the novel feels most alive when he is satirizing the contemptuous airs of England's overseers, fleshing out the wary dance of dependence and defiance that ruled relations in his country for many decades or detailing the slurs endured by an African student in England. At times, Gurnah drops the pretense of fiction altogether to deliver some stinging observations about the ironies that rolled over the continent when the colonial enterprise began to collapse in the 1950s: "No one really understood what a panic was in the offing." (Pantheon Books; 262 pages; $23 cloth)
(MSG)
Article. (Silicon Valley)
Article. (North Bay)
Full text review.
Article.
Full column.
Reinterpreting colonial history is nasty business, as the French recently learned to their chagrin. A law mandating the teaching of France's "positive role" in its colonial possessions left Jacques Chirac backpedaling and inflamed protests in Algeria. Maya Jasanoff's intriguing study of the British and French warring over Egypt and India in the early days of colonialism acknowledges Edward Said's basic analysis, in Orientalism, of how the West suckered-punched the East. Jasanoff, however, also shows that empire-building made for strange bedfellows. A number of colorful outcasts from polite European society made their fortunes in outposts like Lucknow, Seringapatam, Mysore, Alexandria and Cairo. After collecting ethnic arts and foreign wives, some of these adventurers returned to their homelands with the titles and privileges of the landed classes. As Jasanoff points out, the barriers between conquerors and conquered were a lot more porous than we once thought. Among a battalion of fascinating minor soldiers, diplomats and schemers described in the book, Giambattista Belzoni stands out, literally and figuratively: a 6-foot-8 giant from Malta who performed circus feats of strength across Europe before ending up in Egypt in the early 1800s. Belzoni became an "antiquities hunter" who unearthed (or robbed, take your pick) some of the most stunning of ancient Egyptian sculptures from the silt of the Nile. When Belzoni, who had a serious case of Anglophilia, couldn't convince the British Museum to buy his artifacts, he opened his own Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, kicking off a spasm of Egyptomania that wasn't fully slaked until King Tut's tomb was discovered in the 1920s. Belzoni never did realize the honors, riches or respect he thought he was entitled to, and he died of dysentery on a doomed journey to be the first European to make it to Timbuktu in one piece. In a sense, he was just one more victim of Europe's insatiable political sprawl in the name of empire. (Knopf; 404 pages; $27.95 cloth) (MSG)
Full column.
A travel writer doesn't need an excuse to wax nostalgic about the Orient Express, but journalist Andrew Eames has a terrific motive for his rail journey. In 2002, on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Eames retraced the 1928 journey of mystery novelist Agatha Christie from England to the ruins of Ur near Baghdad. As a measure of our devolution, Eames' meander through Eastern Europe to the Near East was a lot less comfortable than Christie's. Eames neatly shuttles between Christie sightings (her hotel rooms have become tourist shrines) and his own revealing encounters with Bulgarian braggarts and Iraqi dissidents, until he finds himself in the path of a NATO bombing run. Despite a penchant for British slang, Eames possesses a keen eye (a cityscape is "pierced by minarets, like needles sticking out of a hand-stitched carpet") and a dark sense of humor, especially when describing the schisms on his Iraqi sightseeing bus—proof that hell is other tourists. (Overlook Press; 403 pages; $25.95 cloth) (MSG)
Review/article.
Full column.
Now that the so-called "real" holidays are over, it's time to celebrate the greatest of manufactured holidays (at least since the card companies invented Mother's Day): Festivus. Seinfeld fans will remember the episode in which Frank Costanza relates a tale of Christmastime toy-store terror while shopping for a doll for George: "As I rained blows upon [another shopper], I realized there had to be another way." And so, a Festivus for the rest of us was born, complete with aluminum pole, feats of strength and airing of grievances (which, come to think of it, are often a part of the other holidays). Festivus has made the leap from fictional to factual, as documented in words, pictures, cartoons and recipes in Allen Salkin's funny little book (a real stocking stuffer, if Festivus called for stockings, instead of sockings). Around the country, people are erecting aluminum poles, creating new culinary traditions ("Ham With Junior Mint and Snapple Glaze," "Crushed Spirits"), airing grievances ("Watching other people being told what disappointments they are can be fun") and naming their cats Festivus. With luck, the fun can continue unabated until Bill O'Reilly and the gang wise up and declare War on Festivus. (Warner Books; 132 pages; $14.95 cloth) (MSG)
Full text review.
Full text review.
Full text review.
Full column.
Late one night, I was waiting for the 22 Fillmore bus in San Francisco, and an aggressive crackster started begging for change, escalating as he ranted: "I need a dime! A quarter! Fifty cents! A dollar, I need a dollar!" "I don't have any change, damn it!" I swore at him. Thing was, I had on a pair of Levis that I loved and washed frequently, and it was exactly at this moment that the thin cloth of the front pockets gave out, cascading coins onto the sidewalk. I tell this story because Steve Powers' graphic-arts book illustrates such tales—street hassles in which one hustler is outwitted by another, much as an immovable object will sometimes overcome irresistible force. "You can't win if I don't lose" reads one of Powers' captions. The pop-art style, in three colors, is flat as your hat, outlined in blaring lettering like the kind discount supermarkets use when postering their windows. (One possible typeface name: Lebanon Bologna 95 cents/lb" Sans Serif Bold). Like all smart cartoonists, Powers has a superhero going—a cowled lowlife called "Super Feen," who is more at home in the reclining position. Even this white-powder-powered slouch redeems himself, with a death and resurrection, heralded by a cloud of lovely pigeons. (Villard, $17.95 paper) (RvB)
Full column.
So much of journalism today depends on celebrity—whether Angelina's womb is full or Lindsay's stomach is empty. Despite famed gossip columnist Louella Parsons' flaws as a writer and a person, she was essential to how our nation became drunk on fame. Biographer Samantha Barbas frames her subject as a pitilessly hard worker from Dixon, Ill. (Ronald Reagan's birthplace), who understood the force of cinema and how it would shape the 20th century. Barbas sketches Parson's days as a $20-a-week scenario writer at Essanay Studios in Chicago. (The company later opened a studio in Niles in the East Bay.) Moving into journalism, Parsons worked for William Randolph Hearst's papers (her column ran from the 1920s to 1964). For decades, she promoted the "Chief"'s movies—a media synergy 75 years before it became a common corporate strategy. Relocating to L.A. because of her tuberculosis, Parsons became a participant in the silent film era's revelry, enjoying crap shooting, toga parties and plenty of booze. Parsons was widely popular, receiving some 1,000 letters a week in her prime in the 1930s. As a gossip columnist, she acted as both a scourge and a whitewasher. Parsons insisted on the domestic virtues of transient, hard-pressed and fanciful people who, if you believed the hype, "never drank and were unfailingly monogamous." When the actors broke this public image, Parsons was merciless. She went after Rita Hayworth and Ingrid Bergman and helped to blacklist Citizen Kane, with its unflattering portrait of the Chief. Although less vindictive and less ultraright-wing than her rival columnist Hedda Hopper (as Barbas frequently reminds us), Parsons could nonetheless be an unappetizing customer. Still, this rigorous, colorful biography recognizes "Lolly" as a crucial gear in the studio-era machinery. (UC Press; 418 pages; $29.95 cloth) (RvB)
Full column.
After the almost posthumously weak last book, Flashman and the Tiger, the new Flashman on the March marks an invigorating return to form by Fraser. This 12th installment of the "Flashman Papers" concerns a startling forgotten incident. The 1868 Abyssinian war was inaugurated by a British diplomatic bungle. The seemingly doomed hostage-rescuing operation was a British attack against the Coptic King Theodore II, a monarch Fraser paints as Africa's answer to Ivan the Terrible. As in the previous 11 books, Col. Harry Flashman distinguishes himself with sardonic snobbery. He falls into bed with both a warrior princess and her sister, the well-fed Queen Masteeat; in between, he shows a yellow streak at the Blue Nile. Still, Flashman is enough of a coward to recognize the real heroism of the 23rd Sikh Pioneers and their leader, the later Field Marshall Napier. Fraser is nostalgic for the British Empire. But unlike the left, he doesn't have to pretend that a hard-scrabble life is more edifying than a well-padded and well-lubricated one. As yet, no one has challenged Fraser on his history, documented in 19 pages of footnotes. Many accounts of the king's reign, such as Wikipedia's, take a higher road, overlooking the ruler's savage madness and his atrocities in favor of his domestic works and his symbolic qualities as a resister of the carving up of Africa by colonists. The region is still on fire, under the U.S.-backed leader Meles Zenawi. "This darling of donors, in truth, makes [kleptocrat Zimbabwe leader] Robert Mugabe look like a boy scout." So says a letter dated Dec. 10 to the State Department by a group called the Ethiopian Americans for Democracy, protesting the foreign aid being paid Zenawi in the name of the war on terror, a campaign whose outcome one imagines that Flashman could predict all too well. (Knopf; 336 pages; $24 cloth) (RvB)
Full column.
Art historian Kenneth Bendiner's subject is too broad for any one volume, but this savory survey travels down some fascinating byways in pursuit of the ways Western artists have used images of food and dining. Bendiner discusses the various meanings of everything from Renaissance religious allegories (Eve and that damn apple) to statements of societal wealth in 17th-century Dutch market scenes to memento mori still lifes (dead game animals remind us of our own mortality, and Goya's Plucked Turkey makes the case for vegetarianism) to the democratic leveling of the diet in the late 1800s (even van Gogh's Potato Eaters can enjoy once-exotic treats like coffee and sugar) to Cezanne's painterly exercises with fruit as planes of color—all the way to the pop irony of Andy Warhol's 200 [Campbell's] Soup Cans. As Bendiner points out, even when painters want to depict scarcity or chide overconsumption, painted food tends to evoke a positive sense of appetite and desire. Food in Painting is liberally sprinkled with illustrations that include a number of unusual and rarely seen examples of the genre. (Reaktion Books, distributed by the University of Chicago Press; 238 pages; $35 cloth) (MSG)
Rafael Palmeiro, Barry Bonds, Kenny Rogers, the Giants bullpen—sometimes, baseball no longer seems worth caring about. Then along comes a book like local author Ralph M. Pearce's From Asahi to Zebras (119 pages; $15 paper). Published by the Japanese-American Museum of San Jose, this history of Santa Clara Valley amateur baseball reminds us that the game once inspired players for its own sake and not just for salaries and endorsements. Working through library archives and conducting interviews with surviving players, Pearce reconstructs the history of the many thriving Japanese-American baseball teams in this area, starting in the early teens and forging ahead all the way to the resurgence of Japanese-American baseball in the 1980s. In the early years of the 20th century, teams such as the San Jose Asahi competed at the Asahi Diamond in Japantown against teams from throughout Northern California and even barnstormed in Japan in 1925. Ten years later, the Tokyo Giants faced off against the San Jose Asahi in a memorable game here that the local team won in the bottom of the ninth with a clutch single by Russ Hinaga. The retelling of the exploits of San Jose's long-ago diamond heroes is as lively as the evocative photos. (MSG)
Full column.
In a few tempest-filled years before World War I, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque disassembled our world, fracturing the recognizable into jumbled shards and chunks and putting them back together like puzzles. Cubism swept away 500 years of Renaissance pictorial tradition. As Braque railed: "Scientific perspective is nothing by eye-fooling illusionism; it is simply a trick—a bad trick." This collaboration, the most astonishing in art history, succeeded in "completely subverting Western ways of seeing," writes Braque biographer Alex Danchev. The two artists—one Spanish, mercurial, irrepressible; the other, French, workmanlike, almost Zen in his patience—challenged each other with experiment after experiment until they couldn't be sure who had painted what. As always with Picasso (who couldn't get along with Matisse either), a falling out was inevitable. Braque disapproved of Picasso's flirtation with fame and embrace of celebrity as a kind of "dereliction of duty." There is much more to Braque's life and work than his yoking with Picasso, and Danchev is expert at tracing the slow payoff of Braque's later years, especially of his series of bird and studio paintings of the 1950s. Danchev's sharp-eyed style finds new insights in familiar territory: Braque's paintings are "slices of speechlessness"; his "world bears the stigmata of strangeness." In one surprising passage, Danchev notes how Cubism, with its bottles, playing cards and other tokens of the low life, was a "hardboiled genre," and goes on to compare Braque and Picasso to Raymond Chandler. Braque's iconic Cubist masterpiece Man With a Guitar could be Man With a Gun—it shot holes through received wisdom with the force of a .45. (Arcade Publishing; 440 pages; $40 cloth) (MSG)
Full column.
At the turn of the last century, American politicians wrote their own speeches and delivered them, unamplified, at great length to enthralled crowds. None did it better than William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925), Democrat, populist and three-time presidential candidate. Bryan made his oratorical bones at the 1896 Democratic convention when he excoriated the rich with his famous "Cross of Gold" speech and earned himself a run at the White House. Historian Michael Kazin makes a strong case for why Bryan's blend of piety and progressive politics laid the groundwork for the New Deal and remains appealing in an era where Joe Lieberman passes for a liberal. Certainly, some of Bryan's quotes resonate today: "There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them." So much for trickle-down economics. Equally compelling: "The question is not what we an do, but what we ought to do. This nation can do whatever it desires to do, but it must accept responsibility for what it does." And yet Bryan is now virtually forgotten. What happened? Most of all, Clarence Darrow, H.L. Mencken and, later, Inherit the Wind mocked him for his role in the 1925 Scopes Monkey trial, in which he helped prosecute a school teacher who gave a lesson on evolution. Kazin points out that Bryan's enemy wasn't science but the ruthless application of social Darwinism to public policy. But the damage was done; he came out of the trial a laughingstock crucified on his own cross of biblical literalism. Even worse for his many worthy causes—including support for women's suffrage and opposition to American imperialism—was Bryan's inability to reach across the color line to embrace African Americans; Bryan wasn't a Ku Klux Klanner, but he endorsed the idea of white supremacy. Kazin stints on the economic issues (especially the free-silver vs. gold-standard controversy that gripped the country in the late 1800s), but he humanizes a significant American type: a true religious believer with a genuine core of moral values obscured by some glaring blind spots. (Knopf; 374 pages; $30 cloth) (MSG)
Review/article.
Full column.
Thought to be extinct, the giant scarlet-crested ivory-billed woodpecker was long something of an ornithological Sasquatch. After the last credible sighting, in 1944, birders who reported seeing the fabled fowl in Southern swamps got dismissed as readily as UFO abductees. As related by Tim Gallagher, editor of Living Bird magazine, the ivory-bill has at last returned from the dead, with confirmed visual and audio proof (accepted by skeptical experts just a few weeks ago). Gallagher's recounts in breathless fashion how he and Bobby Ray Harrison, a fanatical amateur birder, spotted an ivory-bill in early 2004 and then orchestrated a full-court birders' press on an Arkansas bayou to be sure they weren't crazy or heat-struck. The story includes deftly drawn character sketches of eccentric ivory-bill seekers, such as Fielding Lewis, a cigar-sucking septuagenarian who "seemed like a character from Tennessee Williams—like Big Daddy." More soberly, Gallagher links the spectacular bird's decline to the destruction of the South's bottomland forests and their majestic old-growth hardwood trees. With luck, the miraculous resurrection of the ivory-bill might inspire renewed efforts to preserve what's left of its habitat. (Houghton Mifflin; 272 pages; $25 cloth) (MSG)
Full column.
Despite the onslaught of suicide bombings and IEDs, we continue to get emails titled "More Good News From Iraq." Veteran war correspondent Robert Fisk, who worked for The Times of London before moving to the Independent, offers a 1,000-pages-plus counterpoint to such mindless wishful thinking in The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East, a sprawling summing up of his 30 years of front-line journalism. From Algeria and Lebanon to Kuwait and Aghanistan, Fisk has witnessed the brutality of war—both Westerners vs. Arabs, and Arabs vs. Arabs. At times, when describing the wholesale descent into madness that was the Iraq/Iran war, for instance, Fisk sounds a note of universal outrage at the capacity of humans to inflict misery on each other in the name of ideology—as the Kurds were gassed by Saddam, so they in turn committed massacres of their own. In a Michael Moore¬‚like sequence, he discovers a piece of an Israeili-fired missile that destroyed a Lebanese ambulance and tracks it back all the way to the American munitions makes and grills them on how they soothe their consciences at night. At other times, especially when he is excoriating Bush, Blair and Sharon in repetitive, overcooked rhetoric, Fisk can come off sounding self-righteous. In a sense, the book represents a reporter's revenge on all the editors and home-office drudges who cut or censored his copy over the years. Fisk, however, would have been well-served by a tough editor—The Great War for Civilisation suffers from numbingly graphic accounts of atrocities and a leapfrogging narrative. Fisk does illuminate some major events not well covered in the mainstream media—especially the quashing, with bloodletting to spare on both sides, of the Islamists who won a democratic election in Algeria in the early 1990s. He can, unfortunately, also be self-absorbed—on the day of the World Trade Center attacks, his first instinct is to fret that one of his articles will be bumped from the front page. Most interestingly, Fisk uses the story of his father, a World War I British solider, as a framing device to discuss a century's worth of disastrous meddling in the Middle East by Europe and the United States. In one chilling passage, he digs up a quote from the past about the British attempts to control Iraq after the Great War that is chillingly apt today: "'How much longer,' The Times asked on 7 August 1920, 'are valuable lives to be sacrificed in the vain endeavor to impose upon the Arab population an elaborate and expensive administration which they never asked for and do not want?'" (Knopf; 1,107 pages; $40 cloth) (MSG)
Full column.
"An excellent example of the overlap between human-made and natural environments." That's the Salton Sea, 360 square miles of 30-foot-deep briny water seething under the fierce sun on the United States/Mexico border, a parting gift from the Colorado River before it was imprisoned by Hoover Dam. On the 100th anniversary of the Creation Flood—a catastrophe described in far more vivid terms in Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert—Kim Stringfellow photographs the human and animal residue around the ever-eroding rim of this sink, once a visiting spot for hundreds of thousands of seabirds, once a recreation spot that drew Hollywood celebrities, now a blooming septic pond working its way back from a bellyful of agricultural runoff and from massive fish and bird kills (avian botulism and Newcastle's disease both took their toll). By putting portraits of dead tilapia fish next to caved-in motels, Stringfellow underscores the tragedy of the continuing ecocide of California. (Center for American Places, distributed by the University of Chicago Press; 136 pages; $25 cloth) (RvB)
Review/article.
Full column.
Despite Europe's hesitancy about its union, art critic and novelist John Berger (Pig Earth, About Looking) ranges freely over the continent in Here Where We Meet. Labeled a "fiction," the slim volume is really a memoir disguised as an old man's reverie (Berger was born in 1926) in which the author searches for the people who shaped his life. The first "meet" is an encounter with his dead mother in Lisbon. Mom, a practical sort, advises her intellectual son to "stop dropping names." When not delivering minilectures about Rembrandt's The Polish Rider and cave paintings in France, Berger recalls his boyhood in Islington, England, overshadowed by his father's trauma from the trench fighting of World War I; awakens erotic thoughts of a London wartime lover; and conjures up a traditional wedding in the Polish countryside. In spare, poetic images, Berger illuminates a life of both the mind and the senses. The chapter on Lisbon, with its descriptions of trams negotiating "steep one-way streets like straits" and the dizzying array of seafood at the open-air market evokes the city better than any travel book. Indeed, in Lisbon, Berger discovers the metaphor for his whole project: an old cemetery named Prazeres (Pleasures) where "the mausoleums have front doors with window panes through which you can look at the abodes of the departed." (Pantheon; 237 pages; $24 cloth) (MSG)
Review/article.
Full text review. (Silicon Valley)
Full text review. (Santa Cruz)
Once past the marketing barrage (10 years in the making; $2 million advance), Elizabeth Kostova's new Dracula novel is an absorbing, if overupholstered, reimagining of the bloodsucking genre. In layers of flashbacks and epistolary narrative, The Historian relates a young woman's trans-Europe quest in 1972 for her missing father, who, 20 years before, made a similar search for an academic father figure. The driving force is the myth and reality of Vlad Tepes, the Impaler himself, a historical monster turned into a fictional boogeyman by Bram Stoker. Kostova's count makes himself visible mostly in lovingly described parchment texts and rare books squirreled away in musty archives. It's obvious that the author's own studies at Yale and beyond seduced her into permanent bibliophilia, and after much meandering, the story climaxes with a scarifying visit to the eternally undead count's own library, where he is assembling a universal bibliography of horrors, ancient, medieval and modern. Kostova also astutely gives the Impaler his due as the thin red line of Europe's defense against the Ottoman Empire in the 15th century (Transylvania lying between Istanbul and Vienna, where the Turkish armies were finally stopped), while cleverly linking remote history to the near past of the Cold War. (Little, Brown; 642 pages; $25.95 cloth) (MSG)
Full column.
Mo from Las Vegas sent me this small expensively printed comic book about a goofy cartoon bear and a soccer ball. Unless it's not a ball and is, rather, the plutonium core of an atom bomb, shaped like a soccer ball for purposes of implosion. This is possible, since the cute goofy bear nukes a city with a rocket bomb that comes out of his pudgy bear belly. Later, a carnivorous mutant butterfly emerges and devours the top half of the bear—which is sad. On a happier note, half of a woman parachutes out of a plane and gives the dismembered bear some off-camera sexual solace. (The artist censors the ugly scene.) The comic book is printed in my least-favorite shades of violet and pink and resembles a William S. Burroughs Care Bear story. On the back, in a tiny and nigh-illegible cursive: "I would like to thank you for ... more than this (p.s. and more)." These are the only words in the book, which I have now reviewed. Here is as bizarre a sensibility as Las Vegas has to offer, and that's not nothing. (Modus Operandi Publishing; mo@hugscomics.com; $4.99 paper) (RvB)
Copyright © Metro Publishing Inc.