Category: Books & Writers

On the Rocks

John McPhee disciples will appreciate Douglass McCollam on McPhee’s Annals of the Former World — On the Rocks.

McPhee then offers a try-at-home exercise to help break the bonds of animal time:

With your arms spread wide again to represent all the time on earth, look at one hand with its line of life. The Cambrian begins in the wrist, and the Permian Extinction is at the outer end of the palm. All of the Cenozoic is in a fingerprint, and in a single stroke with a medium-grained nail file you could eradicate human history.

The First Post

Wow a new blog. As if there was a shortage. Oh well, this one could prove interesting.

Welcome to the first post of the Book Review’s first blog.

Paper Cuts will be a daily round-up of news and opinion about books and other printed matter. Make that an almost daily round-up. There won’t be posts on weekends. Or holidays. Or on the mornings after the Book Review’s bimonthly drinks nights at Jimmy’s Corner, a bar in midtown Manhattan.

But most days, we’ll be here.

Paper Cuts

History books

A few weeks back NewMexiKen read The Summer of 1787: The Men Who Invented the Constitution by David O. Stewart and said, “It’s a readable, rather well-told narrative about the Constitutional Convention.” I also went on to say, “The classic work on the Constitutional Convention is Catherine Drinker Bowen’s Miracle At Philadelphia, but that I had never read Bowen’s book. I’ve now read it.

Of the two I recommend Stewart. His is clear, concise and more analytical. Bowen’s book is, I think, reflective of much history written a generation or two ago — a little too much he said, he said (there was no she said). It also changes approach in the middle, going from day-by-day to topic-by-topic. This is disconcerting. You know how today you can sometimes read nonfiction and it seems you can almost sense the cutting and pasting? With Bowen you can almost sense the “I’ll never get done doing this; I have to try another approach.”

Which isn’t to say Bowen’s book isn’t worthwhile. It is. It has been the standard work on the Constitutional Convention for more than 40 years.

But I’d read Stewart first.

Meanwhile, I’ve learned about A Glorious Defeat: Mexico and Its War with the United States. In this book, Professor Timothy J. Henderson tries to take a look at the war and its impact from a Mexican perspective.

There’s a interview with Henderson at the American Heritage Blog and, among other things he has this to say:

As for our own time, my suspicion is that most people nowadays don’t have many strong feelings one way or another about the [Mexican] war, simply because they know almost nothing about it. I talk to people all the time—intelligent, educated folks—who are genuinely surprised to learn that the Southwest came to us by way of a war with Mexico. That’s true even of people who’ve lived their entire lives in the Southwest, and of people who grew up in towns with names like “Buena Vista” and “Monterrey.” If more people knew the circumstances under which the United States began the war with Mexico, they might have cause to cringe. But my impression is that folks who like to read about wars tend to favor military history, and from a purely military standpoint the United States acquitted itself very well in Mexico.

The bottom line, I think, is that for Americans—and most peoples of the world, I would guess—winning counts for a great deal, and the United States won the war with Mexico decisively. In the bargain, it achieved the objective of territorial expansion, which I think most Americans broadly supported. And when I read some of the rhetoric in the debate on immigration, I don’t see a nation wracked by guilt over past injustices to Mexico.

I’ll let you know what I think when I get Henderson’s book.

Assault on Reason

Completed Al Gore’s The Assault on Reason. An important book, certainly a strong indictment of Bush. At times however, the book borders on being a screed; just when you think Gore’s exhausted a subject, he comes back around at it again — and sometimes yet again. Frankly, a more heavily edited and sharply argued work would have been better.

Still, compelling in making the case that we live in perilous times and that Bush is the worst and most dangerous president ever. That alone should make it required reading for concerned citizens.

Should we amend all of the textbooks in America to explain to schoolchildren that what has been taught for more than two centuries about checks and balances is no longer valid? Should we teach them instead that the United States Congress and the courts are merely advisory groups that make suggestions to the president on what the law should be, but that the president is all-powerful and now has the final say on everything? Should we teach them that we are a government of men, not laws? Should we teach them that we used to be a democracy but now we only pretend to be?

FDR

Acclaimed biographer Jean Edward Smith (John Marshall, Ulysses Grant) has published a new biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, FDR.

Early reviews are glowing. Smith’s Grant book garnered him a Pulitzer nomination in 2002.

(Actually, I figured this was an important book when I saw it stacked on the table at Costco the other day.)

June 3rd

Larry McMurtry is 71 today. The Writer’s Almanac had a good piece on McMurtry two years ago and NewMexiKen posted it here. About a year ago NewMexiKen and Dad visited McMurtry’s hometown of Archer City, Texas. Here’s my report.

Tony Curtis is 82. Curtis received a leading actor Oscar nomination for The Defiant Ones.

Dr. Zaius was born on June 3rd in 1901. That’s Maurice Evans, famed stage actor, two-time Tony winner, who is perhaps most remembered for playing the Minister of Science and Chief Defender of the Faith in Planet of the Apes.

Jefferson Davis was born on June 3rd in 1808.

Angels and Ages

A fascinating survey of recent Lincoln literature by Adam Gopnik in this week’s New Yorker. He begins:

This all began on a very long plane ride, East Coast to West, when I was reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals,” her book about Abraham Lincoln and his political competitors, and how, in the course of the Civil War, he turned them into a collegial Cabinet. It is a well-told, many-sided story, which attempts to give context to Lincoln without diminishing him, to place him among his peers and place him above them, too.

Coming to the end of the book, to the night of April 14, 1865, and Lincoln’s assassination, I reached the words that were once engraved in every American mind. At 7:22 A.M., as Lincoln drew his last breath, all the worthies who had crowded into a little back bedroom in a boarding house across the street from Ford’s Theatre turned to Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s formidable Secretary of War, for a final word. Stanton is the one with the long comic beard and the spinster’s spectacles, who in the photographs looks a bit like Mr. Pickwick but was actually the iron man in the Cabinet, and who, after a difficult beginning, had come to revere Lincoln as a man and a writer and a politician—had even played something like watchful Horatio to his tragic Hamlet. Stanton stood still, sobbing, and then said, simply, “Now he belongs to the ages.”

Or did Stanton say, as others have claimed, “Now he belongs to the angels”? Read the article and . . .

And the hits just keep on coming

The radio business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side. — Hunter S. Thompson

The above is from Marc Fisher’s Something in the Air: Radio, Rock, and the Revolution That Shaped a Generation.

Fisher, a Washington Post columnist, has written a book any fan of radio will enjoy, an anecdotal analysis of how Top 40 evolved, then FM and talk radio and finally the bland, every station sounds alike — because they’re all owned by about three companies — niche radio of today. We learn about Jean Shepherd, Cousin Brucie, Wolfman and Imus, Bob Gass, Big Daddy Tom Donahue, Rush Limbaugh and others. We find that Dick Clark got away with Payola and Alan Freed didn’t. (And how the payola scandal was mostly a political backlash against “race music” being played for white kids.) We read who came up with NPR, and we read about the consultant who has, to many people’s ears, just about ruined it.

If at times just a little too drawn out with the analysis, when another story would be more welcome, it’s still a very interesting sociological-economic study, with enough pop culture thrown in to make it a good read. (Especially, I suppose, if you’re old enough to have lived through the whole thing.)

Stumbling on Happiness

Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert has won the annual Royal Society Prize for Science Books.

Here’s part of what Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink and The Tipping Point, wrote about Gilbert’s book last year.

Stumbling on Happiness is a book about a very simple but powerful idea. What distinguishes us as human beings from other animals is our ability to predict the future–or rather, our interest in predicting the future. We spend a great deal of our waking life imagining what it would be like to be this way or that way, or to do this or that, or taste or buy or experience some state or feeling or thing. We do that for good reasons: it is what allows us to shape our life. And it is by trying to exert some control over our futures that we attempt to be happy. But by any objective measure, we are really bad at that predictive function. We’re terrible at knowing how we will feel a day or a month or year from now, and even worse at knowing what will and will not bring us that cherished happiness. Gilbert sets out to figure what that’s so: why we are so terrible at something that would seem to be so extraordinarily important?

Atheists with Attitude

From a review in The New Yorker of recent books on the dangers of religion:

And now there is “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” by Christopher Hitchens, which is both the most articulate and the angriest of the lot. Hitchens is a British-born writer who lives in Washington, D.C., and is a columnist for Vanity Fair and Slate. He thrives at the lectern, where his powers of rhetoric and recall enable him to entertain an audience, go too far, and almost get away with it. These gifts are amply reflected in “God Is Not Great.”

Hitchens is nothing if not provocative. Creationists are “yokels,” Pascal’s theology is “not far short of sordid,” the reasoning of the Christian writer C. S. Lewis is “so pathetic as to defy description,” Calvin was a “sadist and torturer and killer,” Buddhist sayings are “almost too easy to parody,” most Eastern spiritual discourse is “not even wrong,” Islam is “a rather obvious and ill-arranged set of plagiarisms,” Hanukkah is a “vapid and annoying holiday,” and the psalmist King David was an “unscrupulous bandit.”

It has everything, except, perhaps, the fun factor

Dan Neil really is my favorite writer. Who else could begin a car review with:

PROPOSED: The Lexus LS600h L is the most complicated, most elaborate machine ever to take to four wheels. What “Ulysses” is to light reading and Confucianism is to the simple declarative sentence, this hybrid-powered limousine is nothing less than everything Toyota has ever learned about cars poured into one stupendous, stupefying, “because we can” performance piece.

I’m willing to entertain contrary opinions. Is a Formula 1 car more high-tech, more highly engineered? These are extraordinary confections, it’s true — all aero-optimized carbon fiber and ballistic engines — but in terms of the sheer number of parts, subsystems, processors and electronics, an F1 car is a Babylonian goat cart compared to the mega-Lexus. The LS600h L, just as a for instance, monitors the driver’s face with infrared beams and detects if he or she is nodding off. This system seems prudent, since the car is so smooth, so honeyed with refinement, with such a gliding, lighter-than-air ride, that a deep coma only ever seems just a few exits away.

The car has everything: “You can fine-tune the loudness of the Lexus’ door lock-unlock beep;” or “rear seating with a climate-controlled ottoman recliner with shiatsu massage function.”

As Constituted

NewMexiKen has finished The Summer of 1787: The Men Who Invented the Constitution by David O. Stewart. It’s a readable, rather well-told narrative about the Constitutional Convention.

The classic work on the Constitutional Convention is Catherine Drinker Bowen’s Miracle At Philadelphia. I’ve never read Bowen’s book so can’t suggest the choice between the two.

But here’s another trivia question from the Constitution.

The Preamble begins with the famous “We the People of the United States, in order to [blah, blah, yada yada, and so forth], do ….

“Do” what? What are the two predicates in this famous sentence?

Brainiac

The one thing you must read today: David Byrne sits down with Daniel Levitin (This is Your Brain on Music) for a fascinating conversation at Seed Magazine. You can also watch video from the interview.

DL: They were first discovered in Italy where a laboratory was recording from a cluster of neurons in monkeys’ brains. There was a monkey who was just sitting aside waiting his turn, watching another monkey reach for a banana and then peel it and eat it. And a clever technician noticed the cell recordings from this monkey and that his motor cortex was going crazy—the part of his brain that would be active if he were actually reaching for something and peeling it back. They thought this was strange. Do we have our wires crossed? You know, we’re measuring this monkey’s brain and not the other. They looked into all possible explanations.

They eventually replicated it with a number of different things, and it turned out that they had discovered what are now called, loosely, mirror neurons: neurons that mirror the activity of others. It’s sort of the old monkey see, monkey do. So then the question is, how does that happen? How is it that monkeys learn to imitate behavior?

DB: So when you watch a performance, sports for example, you’re not only watching somebody else do it. In a neurological kind of way, you’re experiencing it.

DL:Yeah, exactly. And when you see a musician, especially if you’re a musician yourself–

DB: —air guitar.

Bookslut

A year of eating locally

A discussion with Barbara Kingsolver at Salon about her new book. From the introduction:

“The Bean Trees,” Kingsolver’s first novel, was published in 1988 to great acclaim. With 2 million copies sold, it remains in print. Eleven others followed; all told, Kingsolver’s titles have sold 7 million copies. Few American writers have managed to so seamlessly merge their radical politics and commercial success. “If we can’t, as artists, improve on real life,” Kingsolver says, “we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.” Indeed, in her new book, “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life,” she does both.

Part memoir, part investigative journalism, part cookbook, “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” is co-authored by Kingsolver’s environmental scientist husband, Steven Hopp, and their then-19-year-old daughter, Camille. Together they tell the story of the year the family spent eating only food produced on or near their southwest Virginia farm. The central narrative rings with Kingsolver’s characteristic biting humor; Hopp’s sidebars focus on the industry and science of food production. Camille’s passionate essays, informed by youthful idealism and by her sharp intelligence, also include meal plans and recipes.

Award-winning Books

Friday night The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for history. Wright’s book recently won the Pulitizer Prize for non-fiction.

NewMexiKen is reading The Looming Tower and finding it quite interesting, important and readable.

Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination by Neal Gabler won for biography.

Israeli novelist A.B. Yehoshua won the fiction award for A Woman in Jerusalem.

Los Angeles Times Book Prizes

It’s snowing

. . . not far from Casa NewMexiKen, though well above freezing down here at 6,000 feet. A day more wintry than spring-like in any case.

Last night I read my third detective novel in the past few days, this time Vendetta: An Aurelio Zen Mystery by Michael Dibdin. This was the most complex of the three books and surely the most compelling narrative. It’s set in Rome and Sardinia.

NewMexiKen saw The Good Shepherd on DVD over the weekend. It’s a story about the foundings of the modern American intelligence service — OSS during World War II, the CIA after. The film centers on Edward Bell Wilson as the head of covert activities during the 1961 disaster at the Bay of Pigs. In flashbacks we learn how Wilson got to that point.

It’s a good film telling a good story. Matt Damon as Wilson is OK; I am just not a big Damon fan. He doesn’t seem to age when he needs to in a part. Damon is much better in roles where he is a guy in his twenties, now thirties. Angelina Jolie does surprising work as Wilson’s wife. Others include Alec Baldwin, William Hurt, and Robert DeNiro (who directed the film). In minor parts are Keir Dullea and Timothy Hutton.

Detective stories

It was on this day in 1841 that Edgar Allan Poe…published his short story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” It’s the story of the brilliant amateur detective Auguste Dupin and how he solves the crime of two murders that turn out to have been committed by an orangutan. It was the first story to feature a detective solving a crime, and it would spark the entire genre of detective fiction, one of the most popular fiction genres in the history of English literature.

Of course, it wasn’t the first mystery story. The mystery story is as old as literature. What made Poe’s short story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” different was that it was about a man solving a crime by examining and piecing together clues through a process of scientific reasoning. It also introduced many of the elements of mysteries that are still popular today: the genius detective Auguste C. Dupin, the not-so-smart sidekick, the plodding policeman, and the use of the red herring to lead readers off the track. Arthur Conan Doyle borrowed almost all of those elements to create the Sherlock Holmes stories and novels, which were what really popularized the detective story. Doyle had actually done some work as a scientist, so he was able to make the investigations in his stories more realistic.

The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media

Appropriately, in anticipation of today’s anniversary, NewMexiKen yesterday read The Shape of Water by Andrea Camilleri, featuring Inspector Salvo Montalbano. Last night I began Acqua Alta by Donna Leon, a Guido Brunetti mystery. Thank you Poe.

Context

Said to be Michael Lewis’s last paragraph in a article written for the first issue of Portfolio, a new magazine:

At this point, the soul of professional sports is beyond worrying about: Athletes are frantically self-interested; marvelously self-absorbed; always looking for any edge, however unfair; and forever leaping from team to team in search of a few more dollars. In other words, the jock market already has the morals of the stock market.

Lewis was reportedly paid $12 a word for the article, so that paragraph was worth $636 (depending on how you count hyphenated words).

Via Gawker.

The 2007 Pulitzer Prizes for Letters, Drama and Music

FICTION: The Road by Cormac McCarthy (Alfred A. Knopf)
The subject of Cormac McCarthy’s new novel is as big as it gets: the end of the civilized world, the dying of life on the planet and the spectacle of it all.

DRAMA: Rabbit Hole by David Lindsay-Abaire
This wrenching play by David Lindsay-Abaire includes some of the most revealingly nuanced acting to be seen on a stage or screen this year.

HISTORY: The Race Beat by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff (Alfred A. Knopf)
After ignoring the story for years, the news media came to play a major role in the struggle for civil rights.

BIOGRAPHY: The Most Famous Man in America by Debby Applegate (Doubleday)
The Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, an eloquent champion of abolition and woman suffrage, became a celebrity of a far less exalted kind as a result of a sex scandal.

POETRY: Native Guard by Natasha Trethewey (Houghton Mifflin)
In her introduction to Trethewey’s book “Domestic Work,” Rita Dove said, “Trethewey eschews the Polaroid instant, choosing to render the unsuspecting yearnings and tremulous hopes that accompany our most private thoughts.” (poets.org)

GENERAL NONFICTION: The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright (Alfred A. Knopf)
Lawrence Wright offers a detailed, heart-stopping account of the events leading up to 9/11, carried along by villains and heroes that only a crime novelist could dream up.

MUSIC: Sound Grammar by Ornette Coleman
This breathtaking concert recording captures the alto saxophonist and his quartet at the height of their humanistic powers.

Summaries from The New York Times.

And here’s the winning breaking news photo:

Pulitzer Prize

Oded Balilty of The Associated Press: “For his powerful photograph of a lone Jewish woman defying Israeli security forces as they remove illegal settlers in the West Bank.”