July 2, 2009
im Lynch, the author of BORDER SONGS, is reading here on Tuesday, July 7th. Jim’s not famous, but he’s written a crazy good novel. The plot is interesting, telling a story of marijuana smugglers in British Columbia and the American border guards whose job it is to keep them from crossing into the state of Washington. However, it is the strength and originality of Lynch’s characters that really make the book stand out. Front and center is gentle giant Brandon Vanderkool, one of the border guards; he’s six foot eight, severely dyslexic, and finds it easier to relate to birds and squirrels than to other people. His affinity with nature serves him well as he patrols the wilds of the border. His father Norm takes care of Brandon’s ailing mother while working hard to maintain his dairy farm. There’s also Madeline, Brandon’s beautiful neighbor, with whom he has been secretly in love since they were children, and her father Wayne, a wily anarchistic Canadian thumbing his nose at the American side.
I really can’t recommend Border Songs highly enough if you are looking for an imaginative, fun, and engrossing summer novel. I began reading it around 6 in the evening and didn’t put it down until I was finished around 2 in the morning. Ron Charles, award winning reviewer for the Washington Post, also raved about Border Songs in a review which you can read by clicking here. I hope some of you can come and help us welcome Jim Lynch to his reading and booksigning on July 7th. It promises to be a wonderful evening with an exciting young novelist.
---Mark LaFramboise, Book Buyer
June 18, 2009
BOOKS FOR FATHERS
Your dad, your husband, your son – what better present than a good book! Here are a few for many different Dads, who like to read - about baseball, science, foreign policy - and for dads who are workaholics, runners, Kennedy admirers, cooks, and mystery readers.
Baseball fans:
AS THEY SEE ‘EM by Bruce Weber is a lively book about the world of baseball umpires.
SATCHEL by Larry Tye – The legendary African American pitcher who was “too old” when the major leagues finally integrated. Read the encomiums on the back of the book by David Maraniss and Jon Meacham.
Like to read about science?:
LIFE ASCENDING by scientist Nick Lane looks at the transformative moments in evolution called “inventions.” An example is photosynthesis, another is movement.
For the workaholic:
THE PLEASURES AND SORROWS OF WORK explores a number of likely and unlikely occupations. Alain de Botton can make it all interesting.
For the runner in your family:
BORN TO RUN is part travel book, part anthropology by Christopher McDougall. His focus is the Tarahumara Indians of the Copper Canyon in Mexico.
Foreign Policy addicts:
THE INHERITANCE by David Sanger --- New York Times senior journalist wrote an absorbing book about the foreign policy challenges that Barack Obama faces from Pakistan to China.
THE SECRET SENTRY is Matthew Aid’s efforts to report on the National Security Agency to understand why American intelligence has let the nation down.
Kennedy Admirers:
Ted Kennedy’s shocking illness has spawned several fine books – THE KENNEDY LEGACY by Vincent Bzdek of The Washington Post looks at the three brothers and Ted Kennedy’s continuation of their legacy;
THE LAST LION: The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy focuses on the contributions of the Senator and is the work of a team of the Boston Globe and edited by Peter Cannellos;
Cooks and would-be cooks:
RATIO by Michael Ruhlman is a highbrow book for the real cook; he maintains that cooking is simple, just learn how the ingredients work together.
SERIOUS BARBECUE is Adam Perry Lang’s hefty book of recipes for the guy who wants to go beyond burgers and steaks.
For the many mystery readers:
Elmore Leonard has a new one called ROAD DOGS; it’s bound to be funny. THE SIGNAL by experienced novelist Ron Carlson is a dark thriller that received a boffo review from Washington Post reviewer Ron Charles.
June 11, 2009
(20% Off through June 24)
We are starting a new feature. Each week we will present a new book that we think that readers should take notice of – arresting fiction, well crafted history or biography, exciting science reporting, and books about art. The book will be offered at 20% off for everyone for two weeks. The first book in our new program is a report on Afghanistan by two outstanding artists, which received an outstanding review from Chris Hedges on Sunday, May 24 in the New York Times Book Review. This is what our staffer Adam Wattereus has to say:
With a combination of graphic narrative and stark black and white photos, THE PHOTOGRAPHER (First Second, $29.95) chronicles Didier Lefèvre’s 1986 expedition into Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders. The group crossed into the country at night and headed into the mountains, risking dizzying falls, raids by bandits, and attacks by Russian patrols, to set up new hospitals. Along the way they tended to sick children and performed surgery on injured fighters. Largely a story of personal discovery, the book offers Lefèvre’s original photographs alongside of Emmanuel Guibert’s stunning drawings. This is a beautiful, timely and necessary book.
Adam has also begun a Graphic Novel Book Group which meets the fourth Wednesday of each month. This month the group will discuss Ex Machina: The First Hundred Days, Vol 1 on Wednesday, June 24 at 7:30 p.m. For more recently published graphic novel recommendations, click here!
We have many more staff-recommended Summer Favorites posted online. You can download printed catalogs for both adults and children. We have also posted all the reviews online in list formatting for your shopping convenience.
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Children and Teens' Favorites |
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Adult Summer Favorites |
May 14 , 2009
Our staff recommendations Summer Favorites and Children’s Favorites are now available online and will be in the store shortly in printed format. As a taste of what’s to come, we offer you Book Buyer Mark LaFramboise’s review of WANTING and his interview with author Richard Flanagan.
In Tasmania, Mattina, a young aboriginal girl, is removed from her tribe to be raised as a proper English girl by Lady Franklin and her husband, the explorer Sir John Franklin. Later, in England, Lady Franklin enlists Charles Dickens to help restore the good name of her husband after his arctic expedition fails and London buzzes with rumors that his crew has resorted to cannibalism. In Wanting, Richard Flanagan uses this extraordinary history to tell a story of desire, deceit, and betrayal, juxtaposing the brutally colonized wilds of Tasmania and the crowded, polluted environs of Dickens’s London.
An interview conducted by Mark LaFramboise of Politics & Prose Books & Coffee, Washington, D.C., with Richard Flanagan on his novel Wanting.
Mark LaFramboise: Would you talk a little about how you arrived on the title, Wanting? Obviously, Dickens is obsessed with Ellen Ternan and Lord Franklin lusts after young Mathinna, but the implications of the title suggest more than male lust.
Richard Flanagan: I wanted to write a novel about desire in its fullest sense, of wanting as the essence of all our lives. The characters, the story were the way for me to think about such things. Like a water bird that builds a nest attached to a single reed, in the belief that reed will anchor all else against currents and winds and storms, so wanting was the reed around which I spun everything else.
ML: Reading Wanting, I enjoyed the juxtapositions between the richly detailed lushness of Tasmania and the dirty urban setting of London (not to mention the staged setting of Dickens’s drama). How was it, as the author, to be continually shifting place so radically?
RF: I enjoyed writing it. It helped allow me a way of creating a musical patterning to the novel, which I think is the soul of any good novel.
ML: Mathinna, I think, is the heart and soul of the book. Her betrayal by the Franklins is appalling and horrible, but could that relationship have possibly ended well?
RF: Not without it being a different book. “Who recalls a cloud?” de Maupassant asks somewhere. And what writer, if they are honest, recalls why things happened in the writing of a book. I have no idea if it could have been otherwise. All I know is that it in the end it wasn’t.
ML: Are there any parallels with Mathinna’s story and that of Ellen Ternan, both objects of the desires of powerful men?
RF: I have no aesthetic theory and few concrete ideas when I write a book. I trust in that story and impose no neat symmetries or effects on it or the characters. If readers find such things—and they often do—it is what they have discovered, not what I have intended. A writer may intend some things, but the book only succeeds to the extent he fails in such ambitions.
ML: Was it at all daunting to cast Dickens as a character? His life has been vastly chronicled, but you focus on an aspect of his life not usually commented upon.
RF: It’s daunting to write any character well. I have written corpses, seahorses, and pole dancers, among others, and all are daunting. I was interested to write about writing, about the spiritual and physical cost to a writer of making his stories, and Dickens allowed me a way of doing that.
ML: In the afterword you detail the actual historic elements in the novel. Did knowledge of the actual events assist you in framing the story, or did it curtail your imagination? What is the responsibility of the novelist writing an “historical novel”?
RF: The book wasn’t written as an historical novel, but as a meditation on desire dressed up in a motley of story from another time. A soul history, perhaps, but a contemporary novel certainly. A novelist has no responsibilities other than to write a good novel. The present age is in this, sadly, far duller in its understanding of story than, say, an Elizabethan audience, who did not for a moment entertain the delusion that Antony and Cleopatra, for example, was a history lesson, but rather understood it as an entertainment about passion, power, and love.
ML: Wanting is an intense book. As Dickens’s feverish passions reach their limit and Mathinna’s desperation grows more extreme, the story takes on irresistible momentum. Was this part of your original plan (if you plan) or did the pace come to be organically?
RF: It matters not just that there is story in a novel, but that the story drive. If it succeeds in this regard, I would credit it to the low cunning of craft combining with some good luck.
ML: Finally, who were some of the authors you admired while growing up and how do you think they’ve influenced you as a writer?
RF: Admiration and influence are entirely different. There are great writers I admire whose work is so unique it is impossible for them to influence you. Fitzgerald is one such for me. The writers who influenced me most were probably the South Americans among whose number I’d include—as they often do as a spiritual father—Faulkner, along with Kafka, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Borges, Cortazar, Hrabal, Márquez, Neruda, Heaney, Grass, Celan, Carver, Calvino, Bulgakov, Rosa, de Assis. Writing this, I realize I’ve forgotten a much, possibly more significant larger library. Still, their influence has possibly been largely malign; a writer triumphs to the extent he escapes all influences into his own voice. Borges said all writers belong to two countries, the one in which they’re born, and the universe of books. For a long time I believed this to be so. But I am no longer so sure. There is a cusp, and at certain point the path leads not to the acquisition of influences, but to their steady abandonment.
Wanting is $24, published by Atlantic Monthly Press.
May 14 , 2009
MAY GRAPHIC NOVEL RECOMMENDATION
With the cinematic release of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, we are highlighting several graphic novels - some featuring superheroes, such as WOLVERINE: Weapon X by Barry Windsor-Smith, and some non-fiction titles - all showcasing this unique genre which relates information with images as well as text.
VIOLENT CASES by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean ($14.95, picked by Adam Waterreus)
Part autobiography, part childhood fantasy, Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean’s first lengthy collaboration is a beautifully woven tale. The narrator in Violent Cases describes his chance encounter with a doctor who was Al Capone’s osteopath in the 1920s. From this point, the child - who may or may not be Neil Gaiman - delves into the facts and myths of one of America’s most illustrious gangster. Told with the unflinching eye of a child and under the brilliant pen of Dave McKean, this book deserves all the accolades it has received.
BATMAN: ARKHAM ASYLUM: A Serious House on Serious Earth by Grant Morrison and Dave McKean ($17.99, picked by Adam Waterreus)
Two of the best graphic novels of the late eighties included Dave McKean’s majestic artwork. The guy’s a wizard. Take a look at Arkham Asylum, and I promise you’ll be hypnotized. Pair McKean with Grant Morrison, and not only is this one of the most hauntingly beautiful graphic novels ever, it’s also got Batman! Meant to delve into Arkham Asylum’s history, this book goes much further to offer many-layered, intense, and extraordinarily creepy psychological and psychoanalytic portraits of its inmates.
Wolverine: Weapon X by Barry Windsor-Smith ($16.99, picked by Adam Waterreus)
This is probably the single most influential comic book of my childhood. A beautiful synthesis of story and art, Windsor-Smith’s Weapon X is nothing short of masterpiece of graphic storytelling, and not limited to the superhero genre. Gritty, violent, inhuman – it is here that we see how Wolverine comes to be everything we’ve come to associate with the character - a living weapon. An excellent and necessary read.
THE PERRY BIBLE FELLOWSHIP ALMANACK by Nicholas Gurewitch ($24.95, picked by Adam Waterreus)
Called the heir to Erik Larson’s The Far Side throne, The Perry Bible Fellowship Almanack is the complete comics of Nicholas Gurewitch’s hilarious strip. Often four panel shots in which one gets the whole of a story, including the payoff, Gurewitch’s strip is often darkly humorous, erotic, but impossible to analyze. Addictive is one way to describe it, but really, just pick it up, it’s worth it.
MOTHER, COME HOME by Paul Hornschemeier ($22.99, picked by Adam Waterreus)
When Thomas’ mother dies, he escapes into a fantasy world. His father, a logician, is slowly going insane. A lot of people have compared this to Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan. While Ware’s work may have more depth and greater length, Hornschemeier doesn’t let incessant design stimulus get in the way of telling a thoughtful, gorgeous story. Clean and well wrought, Mother, Come Home captivates the reader from the first dream-like pages and never lets go.
THE BEATS: A Graphic History by Harvey Pekar, Ed Piskor, & Paul Buhle, ed. ($22, picked by Conor Moran)
This ambitious project assembles a cast of graphic novel devotés whose work has helped found a literary movement on par with the Beats themselves. These authors and artists provide insight into the amorphous and enviable world of the Beat writers. Largely told through Harvey Pekar’s prose and Ed Piskor’s character-driven visuals, much of this collection takes on the inimitable style of the American Splendor series. Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs are given their due in three long pieces that incorporate much of Beat history along with their personal stories. But the collection’s greatest asset is the attention it pays to the writers who truly made this a movement, rather than just a few like-minded authors. Gary Snyder, Joyce Johnson, and Amiri Baraka are highlighted alongside City Lights and the San Francisco Poetry scene, although the marauding presence of Neal Cassidy is notably absent.
P&P’s new Graphic Novel Reading Group will begin meeting the fourth Wednesday of each month. Please contact Adam Waterreus at awaterreus@politics-prose.com for more information and if you would like to join.
May 6 , 2009
Since we are highlighting travel books this month at 20% off, loyal followers of the Lonely Planet way of traveling will be doubly thrilled to hear about a new series available this month from the guidebook gurus. TRIPS guides ($19.99 each) provide 50-plus jump-in-the-car-and-go itineraries (all under 7 days). They spotlight stunning drives, local culinary curiosities, historical education, and fresh perspectives for urbanites within a manageable region. These are travel guides for the locals, providing suggestions when you're eager to get out of town for several days and when you want to provide a more substantive and creative visit for your out-of-town guests. Icons in the books categorize itineraries by themes (i.e. "iconic" drive, outdoor, quirky, or food-driven), and sidebars include fun, extra features, such as quotes from locals and playlist suggestions for the car ride. You'll even find a “GreenDex” in the back, which highlights sustainable travel options.
Lonely Planet’s Guide to New York, Washington DC and the Mid-Atlantic
Every Washingtonian ought to have this in their glove compartment! Even if you aren’t able to take a full-blown vacation this summer, the TRIPS guide will provide dozens of weekends worth of new experiences, cultural exchanges, and greasy summery food from across the region. From points north and south, you’ll find a Warhol-themed trip to Pittsburgh, an East Coast food tour that goes from Prince Frederick County to New York City, an upscale take on the Appalachian Trail, a cinematic tour of Baltimore, and a heritage music drive through Virginia. Attend to that roadtrip itch that this week’s mid-summer weather has given you, and you’ll be glad you’re reaping the benefits of living on the culturally bustling East Coast. • Lila Umhau
Lonely Planet’s Guide to California Trips
If you’re looking for a mini break full of sunshine, wine, beautiful Pacific Ocean vistas and more, check out the Lonely Planet’s guide to California Trips. In it, you’ll find 68 themed itineraries to help you start to explore all the delights the Golden State has to offer. My favorites include “Up the Pacific Coast Highway” (you can check out the original Cowgirl Creamery near Point Reyes Station, or visit the location in Penn Quarter for inspiration!) and “Hidden Wineries, Hidden Valleys,” which will take you to the greatest rustic Italian restaurant on the planet and some great out-of-the-way vineyards too. • Rebecca Summerlot
Lonely Planet’s Guide to the Carolinas, Georgia and the South
There’s more to the South than sweet tea, fried chicken, and collard greens (though they are all very tasty), and Lonely Planet’s Guide to the Carolinas, Georgia and the South is the book that will take you out of D.C. and into the best of what the South has to offer. Feel like getting some fresh air? Try the Appalachian Trail or Brunswick and the Golden Isles. Want to taste the best food around? Check out “Hogs and Heifers: A Georgia BBQ Odyssey” or, even better, “Pulled Pork and Butt Rubs: Eating in Memphis.” If you’re in the mood to soak up some culture, try the “Southern Gothic Literary Tour,” “Voodoo Tour of New Orleans,” or “Oxford, Mississippi” for a taste of Faulkner and his environs. No matter where you end up, you can be assured that Lonely Planet will guide you to memorable Southern adventures. • Rebecca Summerlot
Lonely Planet’s TRIPS Guides currently cover:
• California
• New England
• The Carolinas, Georgia & the South
• The Pacific Northwest
• New York, Washington DC & the Mid-Atlantic
• Arizona, New Mexico & the Southwest
April 9, 2009
It’s Poetry Month! Politics & Prose has many anthologies of new and selected poetry on display for you to enjoy, as well as many recently released and reviewed poets’ individual collections. Browse some of our selections online to help you fill your month with poetry, or come in the store to peruse our shelves for even more choices.
In addition, in conjunction with Gigi Bradford’s spring poetry class, the store is highlighting a wider array of poetry in translation! Russian, Israeli, Albanian, French anthologies; Neruda, Bolano, Rilke, Virgil, Akhmatova, Celan, Zagajewski, Szymborska, Mort, Rumi, and Hafez just to name a few. Come and browse both the international and English language sections; or sample some of these selections online!
And don’t forget poetry for children! Of course, everyone knows about Shel Silverstein, Jack Prelutsky, and Douglas Florian; and Caroline Kennedy’s anthology A Family of Poems always gets attention, but there is so much more to choose from! Have you tried sharing Langston Hughes with your children, or Nikki Giovanni’s Hip Hop Speaks to Children? We have baseball poems, funny poems, poems for every reader! View the display we have created by stopping in the store. We have many anthologies and colorful picture books of illustrated poems to discover. Or sample some of our selections by clicking this link!
April 2, 2009
It’s Poetry Month… and our staff has picked a table full of poetry in translation especially for you! Russian, Israeli, Albanian, French anthologies; Neruda, Bolano, Rilke, Virgil, Akhmatova, Celan, Zagajewski, Szymborska, Mort, Rumi, and Hafez just to name a few. Come and browse both the international and English language sections; or sample some of these selections online!
Three Literary Jonathans: Franzen, Lethem, and Safran Foer
Admit it: When you visit someone’s house for the first time, you steal a glance at their bookshelves. How are they shelved? It’s a strangely revealing choice. Alphabetically? By size? How to they slice their genres? Do dog-eared college books cohabitate with the latest Booker Prize winner? Do unread books mingle promiscuously with well-thumbed favorites? If there is an ideal order, it is different for each reader. In that spirit, we’ve pulled from the shelves this idiosyncratic collocation: three Jonathans, three writers of daring novels, three contributors to New York City’s literary culture.
Jonathan Franzen is a novelist, essayist and translator living on the Upper East Side. His National Book Award winning novel of family life and its dislocations, The Corrections, catapulted him to national fame. He has also gained notoriety as a memoirist The Discomfort Zone, translator (Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening), and editor and writer of introductions for several other authors’ reissued texts. He writes for the New Yorker.
Jonathan Lethem was born in Brooklyn. The borough has figured as both setting and subject in his two of his ambitious, genre-spanning novels: Motherless Brooklyn, a National Book Critics Circle Award winning literary detective story with a Tourett’s-afflicted protagonist and Fortress of Solitude, a coming of age novel where the unreal worlds of adolescence and comics bleed into each other.
Jonathan Safran Foer ’s two novels combine great formal experimentation and daring with a humane simplicity. Everything Is Illuminated is an enigmatically autobiographical story of a young writer named Jonathan Safran Foer retracing family history in Ukraine, partially told in the bizarre idiolect of his Ukrainian driver and “translator.” Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close treats a more recent tragedy, the World Trade Center attack, with a similar blend of bravura innovation and nearly unsupportable emotion, as Oskar’s quest to regain something of his father is interlined with evocative images and illustrations. He lives in Brooklyn.
Browse their selections in the Fiction Room or through our online links tagged above. Enjoy!
•Michael Allen
March 19, 2009
Last week Alan Moore’s classic graphic novel Watchmen hit our bestseller list; so Adam Waterreus is offering his other current favorites which he now has displayed in the store.
Swallow Me Whole, Nate Powell
Essex County Volume 3: The Country Nurse, Jeff Lemire
Tonoharu, Lars Martinson
Top Shelf Publishers have lived up to their name by putting out three of the best graphic novels of the last year. SWALLOW ME WHOLE by Nate Powell was just nominated for the LA Times Book Prize for the Best Young Adult Novel. This deeply moving and powerful tale is the first graphic novel to be nominated for any LA Times Prize since Art Spiegelman’s MAUS in 1992. Also, Jeff Lemire’s rural tales in Essex County Volume 3: The Country Nurse and Lars Martinson’s Tonoharu, which chronicles the life of an English teacher in Japan, both made the ALA’s Booklist Top 10 Graphic Novel list. It is good to see writers at a small press like Top Shelf getting the accolades they deserve.
The Saga of the Swamp Thing, by Alan Moore
Moore’s run on Swamp Thing was close to revolutionary for graphic storytelling. I swear, parts of this series struck me dumb with awe (imagine, please, shivers running up your neck, mouth agape, eyes not blinking) for all the complexity and beauty which Swamp Thing became under his pen. I know, this is Swamp Thing, but believe me when I say that this is one of the greatest comics ever written; and the first volume is only the tip of the iceberg.
All-Star Superman, Vol. 2, Grant Morrison
Grant Morrison did two things with this series. First, he revived classic golden age Superman action, and then a plausible enchanting death of such an iconic hero. And somehow he makes these two elements work together. Frank Quietly’s obsessively realistic depiction of people and things only makes the drama of Superman’s last days that much more human (this, of course, in conjunction with a Bizarro invasion and Lex Luthor’s inevitable assault). This is a rich and beautiful tale that never fails to please.
The Dark Tower: The Long Road Home, by Robin Furth (Stephen King)
Continuing into previously untold portions of Roland’s past, Robin Furth, Peter David, Jae Lee, and Richard Isanove, do not let you down. I’m a huge fan of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, and yet one could be just as enthralled if they only read these wonderful graphic novels. I’ve found that Furth, David, and their team almost manage to fill these pages with more Dark Tower lore and myth than all seven of King’s books combined. They stunningly reveal Roland’s bewitchment, his and his Ka-tets return to Gilead, and its slow but inevitable downfall to the Good Man, John Farson. The story is amazing, every page a work of art. Don’t miss it.
• Adam Waterreus
February 26, 2009
A recent essay in The Guardian pointed to emerging Pakistani writers, whom, as writer Saeed Shah, pointed out, have been overshadowed by their large neighbor to the east. These books embody our name: politics and prose. Mohsin Hamid is quoted saying, “Great fiction comes from the tension that produced those dramatic political developments.” And Mohammad Hanif says that in Pakistan, to write “something that’s not political is almost impossible.”
We have read all four of the books mentioned in the Guardian article (click here to read it) and can attest that the excitement Shah expresses is well deserved.
Mohammad Hanif’s novel A CASE OF EXPLODING MANGOES (Knopf, $24), an accomplished comedic work that takes place in Pakistan of the 1980s, was shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize. That book will be available in paperback in May.
Kamila Shamsie’s new novel BURNT SHADOWS (Picador, $14) is being published as a paperback original in April. Her multi-generational novel starts in Nagasaki in August, 1945, and continues on to post-9/11 Afghanistan, focusing on three families during and after the partition of India. Her novel is the least complicated stylistically of the four, but it, too, reflects the uncertainties of life in a difficult part of the world.
Last year’s taut political novel THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $15) is a favorite at Politics and Prose. With great deference to Albert Camus, the author, Mohsin Hamid, manages to skewer both East and West through his enigmatic character, Changez, and Changez’s story about his life as a high roller in the United States.
Finally, the debut of the much-praised Daniyal Mueenuddin, who already has managed to have three of his stories published in The New Yorker. The collection of linked short stories called IN OTHER ROOMS, OTHER WONDERS (W.W. Norton, $23.95) explores the brutal effects of class in Pakistan.
February 12, 2009
LINCOLN: THE BIOGRAPHY OF A WRITER (HarperCollins, $27.95; 2008) by Fred Kaplan
In his review in The Washington Post Jonathan Yardley said, “Kaplan's central subjects are Lincoln's compelling interest in language as the instrumental vehicle for civilization and culture," and his specific interest in written language, about which he once said: "Writing—the art of communicating thoughts to the mind, through the eye—is the great invention of the world.”
TRIED BY WAR: ABRAHAM LINCOLN AS COMMANDER IN CHIEF (Oxford, $35; 2008) by James McPherson
In his review in the New York Times, Jean Edward Smith called this book, “a perfect primer, not just for Civil War buffs or fans of Abraham Lincoln, but for anyone who wishes to understand the evolution of the president’s role as commander in chief.”
Ronald White, who spoke last Friday at the store, begins the first chapter of A. LINCOLN: A BIOGRAPHY (Random House, $35; 2009) explaining, “All through his life, people sought to complete the A—to define Lincoln, to label or libel him. Immediately after his death and continuing to the present, Americans have tried to explain the nation's most revered president. A. Lincoln continues to fascinate us because he eludes simple definitions and final judgments.”
Charles Bracelen Flood will speak at the store on February 22. In 1864: LINCOLN AT THE GATES OF HISTORY (Simon & Schuster, $30; 2009) Flood traces the last year of Lincoln’s life and the pivotal events that brought victory to the Union forces, including when Grant was named general in chief. The year ends as he was reelected President only weeks away from John Wilkes Booth’s assassination.
Here are four of the older ones that everybody interested in Lincoln will want in their library:
In our opinion, James McPherson’s BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM (Oxford, published first in 1989, now in paperback, $19.95) is the gold standard book on the Civil War, a compelling, enlightening book.
David Herbert Donald’s LINCOLN (Simon & Schuster, originally published in 1995, now in paperback, $20) is mentioned on every list as the best comprehensive biography of Lincoln. David Donald has taught and written about Lincoln throughout his professional life.
LINCOLN AT GETTYSBURG by Garry Wills (Simon & Schuster, published in 1992, in paperback at $14) is an elegiac tribute to the greatest of all American speeches. The Greek-trained historian and political scientist combines semantics and politics to put the words in their cultural and intellectual contexts.
…and of course,
TEAM OF RIVALS by Doris Kearns Goodwin (Simon & Schuster, 2005, paperback, $21) is a thrilling and romantic story about Lincoln’s relationship with his cabinet. Doris told us that she originally wanted to write about Abe and Mary, as she had with the Roosevelts, but found Mary too difficult to hold her own in the narrative.
November 14, 2008
Stalin's Children
A number of current books, in one way or another, revisit the Stalinist era in Russia. There are contemporary Russians who are writing about this history, but for the purposes of this article, I want to share what several British and American writers with Russian insight and experience are offering.
Perhaps likely to gather the most attention, but not necessarily the best of the lot, is the fiction debut by noted historian Simon Sebag Montefiore. I would absolutely direct customers towards Montefiore for his research and depiction of Stalin as a man and public personality. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (Vintage, $19.95) and Young Stalin(Vintage, $16.95) are now available in paperback.
Montefiore made vast use of Soviet government archives to contribute his perspective to the scholarship available on Stalin, presenting him as a complex character who is as much a product of his time as he is a brutal self-made despot. Montefiore’s narrative structure tightly weaves these histories so they read like novels. Even one not particularly interested in the period or the history will find either of these biographies and political scenarios compelling. So I approached this new novel, SASHENKA, with certain expectations.
It's the story of a privileged teenager whose mother is grooming her for a life of social connection. Her father is a well-connected merchant, but her uncle is a revolutionary who has just returned from a tsarist political prison. The novel traces the young Sasha Zeitlin's path from revolutionary partisan, to privileged Soviet insider during the Stalinist era, to her fall from grace and disappearance, as happened to so many during the purges. I enjoyed the book, and would recommend it to anyone who would like an introduction to this momentous and heady period. I personally found Sashenka's character appealing for her hopeful zeal, although somewhat limited in her depiction.
Sashenka's protected family life and cheery optimism shield her from the revolutionary intrigue and brutality that swirls around her. The novel has intriguing characters and a plausible storyline, but the fact that the principal character leaves her life of merchant privilege just as the revolution erupts, and then secures a place in the Party leadership, seems somewhat improbable. For me, the book only fully rings true towards the end when contemporary characters delve into the unlocked Soviet-era archive to discover the lost trail of Sasha's family.
If you would like a story about one family's survival in the face of improbable odds in the sweep of a troubling period of history, you will enjoy Sashenka for the human interest appeal. However, if you truly want exposure to the stark realities of the Stalinist era, I have three additional recommendations. First, for research honed into a carefully woven historical narrative, read Montefiore's abovementioned earlier books on Stalin. Second, for more encompassing, sweeping depictions of society under the crushing five-year plans and insidious suspicions of informers and counter-revolutionaries, I recommend the weightier chronicle The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia (Picador, $20), by noted historian Orlando Figes, which has just been released this week in paperback.
The Whisperers is a vast chronology of lives and families that were profoundly and suddenly affected by accusations which made on average one in every one and a half families disappear, either by execution or into political prison. It is a devastating portrayal in its sweeping record of the impact of Stalin's terror on the psychological composition of Russians everywhere,
Third, a newcomer on the scene, Owen Matthews, Newsweek's bureau chief in Moscow, has written a fascinating account of his Russian grandfather's disappearance in 1937, his mother Lyudmila's endurance and persistent will to survive in Russian orphanages, the unlikely story of his parents’ love affair, and his mother's escape from Russia to England. Stalin's Children (Walker, $26) was just released in September, 2008, and depicts the harsh, difficult daily life of families divided by suspicion and imprisonment, and the children's survival in poorly staffed and ill-supplied orphanages in the midst of decades of hardship. By focusing on one family's experience, Stalin's Children represents the conditions of life for nearly all Soviet citizens. It also tells the parallel story of Matthews's father, who was a foreign student in Russia, and chronicles the KGB's attempt to recruit him as a British spy. Even in the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras, this account elucidates how difficult it was for ordinary citizens to get permission to emigrate, let alone to maintain their private lives.
Finally, for a novel about a contemporary American's encounter with survivors of the Gulag and the residual impact of the Soviet experience in modern Russia, read Jon Fasman's The Unpossessed City (Gotham ,$25.95; 20% off for members) just published this month. Jim Vilatzer, a thirty-two-year-old Irish/Russian-American, escapes his gambling debts in Rockville, Maryland, by working in Russia on a project interviewing Soviet-era Gulag survivors. He gets swept into a larger scenario involving international criminal intrigue. If you want an accurate and sensitively nuanced depiction of the textures of shady Russian business deals, corrupt police officers, and post-Soviet thugs, an enticing storyline and outlandishly plausible intrigue (because the outlandish IS so plausible in Russia now!), read Jon Fasman's The Unpossessed City.
Andrew Getman
November 7, 2008
Barack Obama has won the presidential election, and in electing him, the United States has confirmed a majority public voice which includes the sentiment that we Americans seek to embrace our national diversity and communicate more openly with the rest of the world. So today seems an appropriate time to revisit the comments made by Nobel Academy Permanent Secretary Horace Engdahl a month ago when he declared Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio the winner of the 2008 prize for literature.
"There is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can't get away from the fact that Europe still is the centre of the literary world ... not the United States," he told the Associated Press. "The US is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature . . . That ignorance is restraining."
While perhaps justifiably provoked by the stance of our provincial political leadership over the last eight years, Engdahl's statement caused defenders of the American publishing industry and our great poets, novelists, and playwrights to raise their hackles. Yet I think their reactions were misguided. Engdahl's point was not that American authors aren't worthy of receiving the award, but simply that by paying limited attention to the greater ocean of foreign-language literature, Americans deny themselves the opportunity to appreciate the talent and perspectives of the larger world.
As Barack Obama said in his acceptance speech, "Our stories our singular, but our destiny is shared;" and this observation can apply to world literature as aptly as to our national identity. The Nobel Prize honors the careers of distinguished and celebrated contributors to the literary field such as Doris Lessing and also offers the opportunity to raise the status of authors whom many readers might never have noticed. Look at the appreciation we discovered for Elfriede Jelenek, Naguib Mahfouz, and Orhan Pamuk after they won the awards. J. M. G. Le Clézio is certainly of this noteworthy literary caliber.
Politics & Prose can help fill some gaps for you with a good selection of Le Clézio's work that is currently being published in English, and even fill an order if you would like to obtain some of his writing in French. I especially endorse the novel Onitsha because it provides insight into some of the early influences on Le Clézio as a thinker and writer. He was born during the rise of World War II and did not initially know his father, who was serving in Nigeria as a doctor. Like the character Fintan in the book, the young Le Clézio only was reunited with his father in Africa at the age of eight.
ONITSHA (Bison Books, University of Nebraska Press, $15, paperback) portrays the confusion and delight of a bright, curious, and articulate young boy who discovers and deciphers the mysteriousness of the stories, culture, and people of another country, as well as the shame of being identified with the inequality and harsh brutality of European colonialism. In this vein, this novel can be compared to the depth of thought and description in Graham Greene's novels, with their fascination and respect for the beauty and complexity of traditional society, and conflicted emotions and ethical investigations inherent in European relations with Africa.
THE ROUND & OTHER HARD COLD FACTS ( Bison Books, University of Nebraska Press, $19.95, paperback) is darker, and more compares to J.D. Salinger or Anton Chekhov as a collection of thoughtfully descriptive short stories which conceal their full impact until the end. Most are dark meditations on contemporary disaffected and disempowered French citizens or immigrants living on the margins of society. Alienation, violence, and loss are prevalent, but in the midst of these themes, there is a lyrical and rhythmic beauty to his prose that shines through even in C. Dickson's translation.
WANDERING STAR (Curbstone Press, $15, paperback) is also beautifully translated by C. Dickson. In this novel, Le Clézio seems to take on still another style. In a more tender tone, he relates the story of Esther, a Jewish girl who flees Europe at the end of WWII to take part in Israel's founding and concludes with the parallel story of Nejma, a dispossessed Palestinian girl who in turn becomes a refugee. A moving expression of hope in the midst of exile.
And until more releases and translations become available, THE PROSPECTOR (Verba Mundi, David R. Godine, $22.95) is our final offering to our readers and is currently being offered at 20% off for members. Again, Le Clézio adapts a different tone, which can be attributed more to his gifts as a writer than to the translation. The Prospector is the story of a young man's quest for his personal identity. Having grown up the privileged son of colonists in Africa, he turns to a life of traveling and adventure when a hurricane strikes destroying the plantation and his father dies. In turns, he becomes a sailor, a treasure hunter, and a soldier in the trenches of France during World War I. A sweeping tale of the beginning of the century, also a highly recommended introduction to Le Clézio's work.
I have hopes that more will become available soon. I studied French literature in the late ’80s, a time when his acclaimed novel Le Desert had just been published in France, and, in the early ’60s, his Le Proces-Verbal (translated into English as The Interrogation, and now out of print) had drawn attention as another social critique akin to Sartre's Nausea and Camus's Stranger. Yet none of his novels made it onto my professors' curricula. His following continued to grow, and Le Clézio again received critical praise in France in 2004 for L'Africain an account of his father's work in Nigeria. Perhaps with the award, these titles and others will become available to the English-speaking public. We will keep you posted! Here's to being a citizen of the world and part of the global literary dialogue!
-Andrew Getman
October 22, 2008
FRIENDLY FIRE
A.B. Yehoshua
(Harcourt, $26)
We have been privileged to have the great Israeli writer at the bookstore for several of his books, including Mr. Mani and Open Heart. As with Liberated Bride (his last book), Friendly Fire concerns itself with a pas de deux, a marriage between two accomplished people. Whereas in Liberated Bride the wife, a judge, was the wise partner and the husband, impulsive, in Friendly Fire, the husband, Amotz, stays at home fulfilling all of the functions for a three-generation family, while Daniella flies to Tanzania to see her brother-in-law, Yirmiyahu, and mourn her sister. "Friendly fire" is how her sister’s son was killed, and Yehoshua probes the sorrow of the incident and the corrosive effect it had on his parents’ marriage. Perhaps friendly fire refers to the Hanukkah candles as well, since the action takes place during the eight days of Hanukkah. I love this book for Yehoshua’s humanity and particularly his portrayal of long and loving marriage.
October 22, 2008
SEA OF POPPIES
Amitav Ghosh
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26)
I have loved almost everything Ghosh has written, but Sea of Poppies is the best. He has a huge canvas to explore the forced servitude of Indian laborers taken to Africa and the West Indies to work on plantations. A huge canvas, because Sea of Poppies is the first book of a trilogy. The year is 1838 and slavery has been abolished in Britai, forcing the traders to find a new way of obtaining cheap labor. Ghosh introduces a large cast of appealing characters and dastardly villains. He begins in the villages of eastern Bihar with Deeti, who paints a vessel with masts that she has never seen; her addicted husband, who works at the British opium factory; a bankrupt land owner, Raja Neel Rattan; an American sailor, Zachary; Paulette, a young Frenchwoman, and her Bengali “brother” Jodu. The villains include: Benjamin Burnham, an unscrupulous British merchant, and his Bengali agent, Baboo Nob Kissin; and Mrs. Burnham, Paulette’s guardian. (Amitav Ghosh will present the book at Politics and Prose on November 6.)
October 22, 2008
IN HOVERING FLIGHT
Joyce Hinnefeld
(Unbridled Press, $24.95)
The small Unbridled Press took a chance with a first novel that explores a large number of themes: love and friendship and motherhood and work. The locale for the book is along the Delaware River in Pennsylvania, north of Philadelphia, and the New Jersey coast, familiar territory to many of us. Addie Kavanaugh and her husband Tom are famous for their books on birds. Addie’s death is the occasion for sharing memories by her husband, her two best friends, and her daughter. I thought the relationship between mother and daughter was particularly finely drawn. Hinnefeld also explores a more unusual theme: what happens to a woman who takes up a cause and finds herself on the losing side. She is despondent because of her inability to prevent the degradation of the environment which has resulted in fewer birds. As she despairs, she retreats from the people who love her. Click here for Ron Charles’ splendid review in last Sunday’s Book World. (Joyce Hinnefeld will appear at the store on November 16.)
