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Reviewer key (JF) = John Freeman (MSG) = Michael S. Gant (RK) = Rick Kleffel (RvB) = Richard von Busack Ice Haven by Daniel Clowes Full text review. Incendiary by Chris Cleave Review/article. Istanbul: Memories and the City by Orhan Pamuk Full text review. It's Not About the Bra by Brandi Chastain Review/article. The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism by Ross King Full column. Ross King (Brunelleschi's Dome) deploys two opposing artists to chronicle the rise of Impressionism in France in the late 1800s. "Short, arrogant and densely beaded" Ernest Meissonier's Napoleonic battle scenes impressed viewers with their verisimilitude. At the same time, dapper, debonair and also densely bearded Édouard Manet was jettisoning academic technique in favor of bolder colors and rougher brush strokes. King relates the fortunes of the two men at the annual Salons, where political infighting determined who got exhibition space; the more daring were shunted aside to the Salon des Refusés. None was more outrageous than Manet. Other artists gave their nudes the trappings of classicism—Manet posed his prostitute Olympia, and French audiences reacted with exaggerated shock. Eventually, of course, Manet, and Impressionism, triumphed, and Meissoner slipped into obscurity. King provides a quick-paced chronicle of French social and political life at a time when art seemed to matter in a way we can no longer imagine. (Walker & Company; $28 cloth) (MSG) La Perdida by Jessica Abel Full column. Writing about a shallow, passive, naive character presents special problems, particularly if the character isn't witty or unintentionally funny. Abel's graphic novel concerns Carla, a Chicago-raised media—half Mexican, half American—who spends an ultimately disastrous year in Mexico City. Carla resembles the woman Jean Seberg played in Breathless: a pretty American unconscious of her potential to cause trouble. The aimless girl begins as a typical alterna-turista, a Fridaholic; she is crazed for folkloric sculptures and dazzled by the harrumphing political pronouncements of a Communist named Memo (short for Guillermo), who is about 15 years older than she is. She has affairs with a cynical Yank sniffing at the traces of the Beats (he seems to live in the apartment where William S. Burroughs played that unfortunate round of "William Tell"). Later, she takes up with Oscar, a slightly feckless slacker with dreams of being a DJ. Her aimlessness turns dangerous when the petty drug dealers around her decide for a bigger score. Everything that made Abel's comic-book 0series Artbabe so inconsequential is back, only south of the border: conversation after conversation between barely distinguishable characters, scenes of pointless gossip on telephones. Abel evinces a real ardor for cutting away from conflict, and she rarely uses the silent panel that tells all. By the time Carla finally gets into a hostage situation, it is a little too late to care. While the use of Mexico City slang is evocative (the glossary is quite worthwhile), there is not nearly enough travelogue, though the drunken trip to the Xochimilcho gardens is a highlight. (Pantheon; 275 pages; $19.95 cloth) (RvB) The Land of Orange Groves and Jails: Upton Sinclair's California edited by Lauren Coodley Full text review. The Last Expedition: Stanley's Mad Journey Through the Congo by Daniel Liebowitz and Charles Pearson 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) Lee Miller: A Life by Carolyn Burke Article. The Life of David by Robert Pinsky Full column. Dreaded king. Beloved poet. Michelangelo's icon of young male beauty. Old man led into terrible folly by his lust for a woman. "The text reads the reader," says author Robert Pinsky—the aspect of the Old Testament's King David that one finds most compelling depends on the beholder. The stage of David's life requires a look into the bloodiest politics of Judea, where even the nomenclature is fearful: "Zipf, Dagon, Ziklag ... as remote as the planets of science fiction." But there may have been something realistic even in the most seemingly fanciful details: Pinsky notes that Roman army surgeons carried tools to remove sling stones; why couldn't David have killed his Goliath with such a weapon? It all has to be true, Pinsky decides, quoting writer Duff Cooper: no primitive people would have made such a flawed leader their national hero unless it was fact. As for David's people, they have their own truth: "A logic respectful of darkness, frugal of superiority and fortune ... a brisk practical sense that in the face of God's power, one goes about the business of life ... with that all-mighty Hand hovering always over one's head." Essential reading, in this, the most religious nation in the world. (Nextbook/Schocken; 209 pages; $19.95 cloth) (RvB) Lighting Up: How I Stopped Smoking, Drinking and Everything Else I Loved in Life Except Sex by Susan Shapiro Full text review. Lincoln's Melancholy by Joshua Wolf Shenk Full column. Listening to the state-of-the-union speech, it is hard to imagine that 145 years ago, we had a president who was willing to learn form his own shortcomings. Those who met Abraham Lincoln often commented on his sorrowful aspect; what was then termed "melancholy" is now called depression. Scholar Joshua Wolf Shenk pushes the diagnosis to the limit in Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness. While it is known that Lincoln suffered two significant nervous breakdowns, contemplated suicide and even published a poem called "The Suicide's Soliloquy," Shenk indulges in some farfetched retrospective therapy. Lincoln had more than his share of bad days, but he also drew on a deep reserve of intelligence, morality and humor to see him through. Whether he was certifiable or not, Lincoln was, as Shenk writes, "always inclined to look at the full truth of a situation, assessing both what could be known and what remained in doubt." That's sooo 19th century. (Houghton Mifflin; 350 pages; $25 cloth) (MSG) The Lion in Autumn—A Season With Joe Paterno and Penn State Football by Frank Fitzpatrick Full text review. Little Children by Tom Perrotta Review. Little Green: Growing Up during the Chinese Cultural Revolution by Chun Yu Full text review. Little Money Street: In Search of Gypsies and Their Music in the South of France by Fernanda Eberstadt Full column. Entranced by the Gypsy band Tekameli, novelist Fernanda Eberstadt moved to Perpignan, France, near the Spanish border. Warily, the Gypsies accepted her into their highly dramatized lives, poised between "an older, shabbier, weirder Europe" and the coddling embrace of the French welfare state. Eberstadt sounds like Greil Marcus describing a band that has no interest in, no real concept of, fame. Its members prefer a homemade aesthetic: "Every piece of music is bootlegged—recorded from live performances by musicians you have never heard of." This is a beautifully observed record of a people who rebuke everything that Thomas Friedman stands for. (Knopf; 242 pages; $24.95) (MSG) Living With the Changing California Coast by Gary Griggs Article. Locked Rooms by Laurie R. King Full text review. Love and Other Impossible Pursuits by Ayelet Waldman Article. Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis Full column. Wunderkind novelist (Less Than Zero) and feminist punching bag (American Psycho) Bret Easton Ellis, having apparently exhausted his grab bag of narcotic, sexual and forensic tricks, cannibalizes himself in his latest novel, Lunar Park. The unreliable first-person narrative starts like a memoir of Ellis' own checkered career—early success followed by wretched excess—then turns sinister when a young man who looks just like Patrick Bateman, the fictional murderous clothes horse of American Psycho, starts stalking his creator, threatening his fragile marriage and menacing his children. Eventually, the unstable, drug-fogged Ellis is haunted by various manifestations of his previous characters, including a fake detective (shades of Clare Quilty in Lolita) and his own dead and despised father. At times, Ellis can be an amusing satirist in the manner of Tom Wolfe; he's especially good at skewering the self-delusions of the entertainment elite ("Couples counseling always reminded me of what a terrible thing optimism was"). Too often, however, he falls back on dropping designer brand names (Starbucks, Xanax, Ketel One) as a shorthand for psychological insights. In American Psycho, Ellis took a not-half-bad idea—Reagan-era greed expressed as a kind of serial killing—and bludgeoned it into submission with shock-effect prose. Lunar Park wants to investigate all the tricky notions of authorship ("How can a fictional thing become real?") and make a statement about fathers and sons visiting their sins on their grandchildren. But all that is too much weight for a story that quickly sinks from a portrait of the artist as a harried celebrity through a layer of Stephen King cheap thrills all the way down to the muddy sediment of The Amityville Horror, complete with ghostbusters and a child's stuffed-bird called a Terby that sprouts real wings and blood-soaked fangs. Does it help to know that Terby spelled backward is "Y [why] Bret"? Probably not. (Knopf; 308 pages; $24.95 cloth; Ellis appears Sept. 10 at 2:30pm at Capitola Book Cafe, 1475 41st Ave., Capitola.) (MSG) Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Vol. 4 edited by Maxim Jakubowski Full text review. Matisse the Master—A Life of Henri Matisse: The Conquest of Colour, 1909-1954 by Hilary Spurling Full column. French painter Henri Matisse usually comes out on the short end of the brush in comparison with Picasso, who was always more political, more intellectual, more publicity worthy. While Picasso's Cubist innovations were hailed by critics, Matisse's experiments with pattern and color were sniffed at as decorative and frivolous, especially when, in old age, he stopped painting and started creating collages from scissor-cut forms pinned to sheets of brightly colored paper. It didn't help that much of Matisse's best work was hidden away from view in Soviet Russia at the home of his patron Sergei Shchukin or in the almost inaccessible collection of American millionaire Albert C. Barnes for most of the 20th century. Hilary Spurling's new biography (which completes a two-volume work begun with The Unknown Matisse) redresses the balance between the two 20th-century modernist titans (who admired each other greatly, if a little warily). Spurling rightly points out how startling and influential Matisse's forays to the furthest reaches of optical perception and pure color really were, provoking shock and curses from appalled gallery goers when they got a look at the assault of pinks and greens that is Nymph and Satyr. But her analysis of individual paintings is not as insightful as her understanding of the complex web of family relations that allowed Matisse to pursue his art with obsessive force—even at 70, Spurling relates, Matisse said that he still "felt the urge to strangle someone before he could begin to paint." Matisse's wife, Amélie; his sickly but dogged daughter, Marguerite, who endured endless operations to keep her collapsed windpipe open and who was tortured by the Nazis; and a succession of devoted models/muses/nurses coddled and cajoled the crusty patriarch through the horrors of two world wars, unending marital strife (he and Amélie eventually separated), depression and multiple illnesses. All were in thrall to Matisse and his vision. As the surrealist French poet Louis Aragon wrote in his strange, fevered "novel" about Matisse (a book well worth seeking out for its personal observations of the artist in the 1940s), "One is as powerless before genius as before a snake." (Knopf; 512 pages; $40 cloth) (MSG) Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel García Márquez Full text review. Mencken, the American Iconoclast: The Life and Times of the Bad Boy of Baltimore by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers Full text review. Mimi and Toutou's Big Adventure: The Bizarre Battle of Lake Tanganyika by Giles Foden Full column. The source story for The African Queen (both the Bogart/Hepburn movie and the C.S. Forester novel) rivals its offspring for "mad dogs and Englishmen" eccentricity. During World War I, Geoffrey Spicer, a disgraced British officer, transported two gunboats across half of Africa to Lake Tanganyika to challenge the German Navy. Like the obsessed Fitzcarraldo in Werner Herzog's movie, Spicer and company (whose ranks boasted a pet monkey named Josephine) dragged the pieces of the Mimi and the Toutou over some fearsome terrain—like "swamps which actually move about," Spicer wrote. Despite a lack of tactical skills (even his semaphore signals were indecipherable), Spicer managed to sink a German ship, then immediately spiraled into a funk, reverting to relative obscurity until re-emerging, highly disguised, as Charlie Allnut. Foden's prose, with a nod to Evelyn Waugh, is appropriately dry in its accounting of the wilder improbabilites of this too-true-to-believe war story. (Alfred A. Knopf; 250 pages; $24 cloth) (MSG) The Monster At Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu by Mike Davis Article. Myself & the Other Fellow: A Life of Robert Louis Stevenson by Claire Harman Full column. There is no shortage of RLS biographies, starting with the people who knew, loved and leeched off him. And Stevenson (1850-94) himself left plenty in the way of memoirs, letters and recollections. Still, Claire Harman's stylish chronicle makes for fascinating reading, perhaps because there is no way to deromanticize the life of the reed-thin, consumptive Scottish fable spinner, who jaunted through France on a donkey, transited frontier America by train, dallied in Monterey, San Francisco and Calistoga and then island-hopped through the South Seas—all in 44 years. Between bouts of blood coughing, a stifling upbringing with a neurasthenic nanny and marriage to an older, strong-willed woman (Fanny Stevenson, who rates several biographies of her own), Stevenson somehow managed to churn out an astonishing array of novels, children's classics (Treasure Island, Kidnapped), poetry and polemic. Harman's honest assessment of RLS's literary legacy doesn't overlook the low points—and there are many in a life spent scribbling for dollars on deadline—while highlighting his significant influence on H.G. Wells, Joseph Conrad and even Thomas Mann, whose Magic Mountain is set in the same sanitarium where Stevenson sought a cure for his lung problems. (HarperCollins; 503 pages; $29.95 cloth) (MSG) Nicholas Miraculous: The Amazing Career of the Redoubtable Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler by Michael Rosenthal Full column. William Jennings Bryan is practically Lincolnesque in the nation's memory compared to Nicholas Murray Butler, who was born in 1862 (two years after Bryan) and ran New York's Columbia University like a personal fiefdom for 44 years. And yet Murray, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931, was once a world-famous, feted public intellectual who pontificated from the highest editorial platforms. In our time, when university presidents like Larry Summers of Harvard are driven from office by restive faculty and Robert Dynes of the UC system is called on the legislative carpet, it is hard to imagine how firm Butler's grasp was on Columbia and the higher-education establishment in the first half of the 20th century. Columbia professor Michael Rosenthal tries to soften Murray's flinty edges, but the reader's sympathy goes out to Murray's victims, including several distinguished professors who dared speak their minds and were summarily dismissed. Even students who satirized the president in print found themselves expelled. Murray, a quintessential plutocrat, believed that the corporation "represented all that was best in the American economic system," which made him the polar opposite of Bryan. Unfortunately, Butler was as much an anti-Semite as Bryan was a racist. The only tick on the ledger for Butler was his steadfast opposition to Prohibition, which Bryan championed. Otherwise, one enjoys a bit of guilty pleasure from learning that this public bully was himself bullied by his second wife, who wouldn't even allow his daughter from his first marriage to visit him at his house. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 528 pages; $35) (MSG) No Heaven by Alicia Ostriker Full text review. The Order of the Poison Oak by Brent Hartinger Review/article. The Oxford Guide to Library Research by Thomas Mann Full column. The siren call of the Internet justifiably worries librarians. When students, professors and journalists think that surfing the web is easier than cruising the stacks, they might never learn what they're missing. Even more tempting is the grail of universal access promised by Google and others with their projects to digitize whole libraries. Unfortunately, as Thomas Mann, who works at the Library of Congress, points out, the common Internet keyword search produces far more textural dross than gold. Even if we knew what algorithms search engines use to rank results, those results are still no better than the search terms entered, even if, as Mann writes, "those terms are not the best ones in the first place." Keyword searching does not allow for variant spellings, for instance, nor does it filter out "the thousands of hits on the right words in the wrong contexts." No cybersubstitute yet exists, Mann argues, for the vast intellectual superstructure of subject hierarchies (from general to exquisitely precise) created by armies of catalogers and available in the hefty Library of Congress Subject Headings volumes. Mann's handy guide provides plenty of quick suggestions for maximizing the resources of a good library (including his emphasis on the overlooked power of serendipity in open-stack browsing), as well as tips for finding web-based archives that really work. (Oxford University Press; 293 pages; $16.95 paper)(MSG) Paper or Plastic: Searching for Solutions to an Overpackaged World by Daniel Imhoff Full text review. The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century by Steven Watts Full column. Henry Ford, father of the flivver, would applaud Chrysler's Lee Iacocca for consorting with Snoop Dogg. Ford, after all, made the automobile a ubiquitous consumer good with some astute publicity stunts: racing cars with daredevil hero Barney Oldfield and going on headline-grabbing camping trips with Thomas Edison. The assembly-line genius would also approve of the "employee discount." Ford pioneered the idea of "low cost and high wages" leading to a better life for everyone (an equation that Wal-Mart has only half understood). Steven Watts' biography provides a detail-packed, if somewhat dry, accounting of Ford's good news/bad news life. The magnate (who sounds like a mutant hybrid of Charles Foster Kane and Montgomery Burns) adopted the Five-Dollar Day in the teens but quashed labor protests in the 1930s. He touted family values while keeping a mistress and tormenting his only son, Edsel. He accumulated a fortune off the Model T, but refused to evolve when other car companies overtook Ford's sales. He lobbied for peace but was a virulent anti-Semite who received a medal from Hitler. (Knopf; 614 pages; $30 cloth) (MSG) [ Books Central | Metroactive Central ]