Archive for 2008
“One Woman’s Army: The Commanding General of Abu Ghraib Tells Her Story,”
By Janis Karpinski with Steven Strasser (2005, Hyperion, $24.95 hardback, 242 pages.)
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If you’ve ever wanted to know what it would be like to achieve all you ever hoped, then to have it all ruined before your eyes, this book can fill you in.
Janis Karpinski is the ill-starred (ahem) general of the 800th Military Police Brigade, of whom a few soldiers apparently cooperated in the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
This past Thursday, Karpinski spoke of these and other events at an event arranged by the Mid-South Peace and Justice Center.
Leading up to the Abu Ghraib scandal, she had a remarkable military career, of which her book supplies a comprehensive precis.
In 1960, during the Eisenhower administration, at the age of seven, she decided she wanted to be a soldier — after finding World War II mementos of her father in the attic of her Rahway, N.J., home.
“I put the the had on my little blonde head and stood up straight, feeling as tall and proud as my father had in the flush of victory after a great European war,” she writes. (P. 1)
Little did that child know how hard it would be for her to achieve anything like the military accomplishments she envisioned.
Mary Roach is my hero. First she wowed me with Stiff, an exploration of dead bodies and what happens to them. Then she gave me goosebumps with Spook, a scientific look at the afterlife.
And now? Now she’s forged into what is, perhaps, science’s true final frontier. No, not space. Sex. (Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, 319 pages, $25, W.W. Norton & Company.) 
Roach, a fearless and often self-deprecatingly klutzy reporter, traces the recorded history of sex research and condenses much of it down into the more entertaining — and unbelievable — bits. She pores over reports, and visits scientists and doctors all over the world to gain insight into their life’s work, which she finds is often done just this side of the brink of financial and cultural peril (take Dr. Ahmed Shafik, who must try to find research subjects in Egypt, a Muslim country that you could fairly describe as sexually repressed). Most governments don’t like to spend a lot of money on sex research, and sex researchers have to contend with the fact that many people just assume that they are voyeuristic pervs just waiting for the chance to observe test subjects going at it.
The writer spends his life in a solitary landscape of desk, typewriter and window through which he gazes out at the world to recharge his creative battery.
At least he used to.
Now, it’s probably more Mac, Starbucks and iPod. Nevertheless, writing is a solo and, mostly, lonesome pursuit. Paul Auster pours this feeling of seclusion out onto paper and into novels populated by rich, though solitary, characters.
In his latest, “Man in the Dark,” (Henry Holt and Co., $23) 72-year-old August Brill has recently moved in with his daughter and granddaughter after an accident that has left him somewhat incapacitated.
The house is one of sadness and loss, his granddaughter Katya having lost her boyfriend less than a year earlier to a horrific crime, the details of which we get in only the last few pages of the book.
Brill and Katya spend hours upon hours each day watching and discussing movies to move the time along and redirect their emotions. Brill spends his sleepless nights lying awake in the dark, creating stories to forget Katya’s pain and the pain he feels at having lost his own wife not long before.
It is one of these stories (which takes up a majority of the novel) that we meet Owen Brick, a man who travels into an alternate world, an America where there is no 9/11 tragedy, yet one where a civil war has broken out after the chaos of the 2000 presidential election. Brick is sent to this alternate America to take his instructions; to be sent back to his own world to kill the man who has developed the story of the civil war in his mind, to kill a man he’s never met, a man named August Brill. The intricate tale touches reality, the author asking for death from his subconscious.
“Man in the Dark” is reminiscent of Auster’s previous book, “Travels in the Scriptorium.” In fact, it almost seems as if the latter was a writing exercise for the former, that was accidentally published.
Both are good reads, though not breezy beach reading. They allow us into the artist’s mind to wrap ourselves in loneliness and despair, and to learn where fiction might find its origin. Reading Paul Auster can be a bit like watching sausage made, though in this instance we can’t help but devour the ingredients as we await the final product.
“The Black Hand: A Barker & Llewelyn Novel,” by Will Thomas
(2008, Touchstone, 289 pages, $14, paperback)
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At last, I find a new story and cast of characters after my own heart — albeit with a Sicilian dagger.
This is the fifth in a series of historical mysteries set in England in the 1880s. The heroes, Cyrus Barker and Thomas Llewelyn, would have been contemporaries of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John H. Watson (no relation to yours truly, although that happens to be the same name as my father, and my grandfather was a doctor — of veterinary medicine). Also, Barker and Llewelyn bear a surface resemblance to the venerable duo.
But while Holmes shows his remarkable mental acumen (e.g., concluding people’s activities from pet hair on a pant-leg) regularly throughout a story, Barker, who plays the lead sleuth in this series, spends much of this story, at least, teaching his apprentice, Llewelyn, about the sociology of London’s underworld.
And that’s just fine with me.
On September 10, the Library of Congress is going to present, for the first time, an award for lifetime achievement in fiction-writing. The award will be presented in a ceremony to –
Well, wait a minute. Before I actually name the lucky author, let’s speculate on whom it could be. Let’s consider the obvious choices for a lifetime achievement award in fiction writing. Of course, one criterion is that the writer be, you know, living.
On with the thinking cap. Here goes.
John Updike
Joyce Carol Oates
Philip Roth
E.L. Doctorow
Toni Morrison
Anne Tyler
Thomas Pynchon
Don DeLillo
Ernest J. Gaines
Richard Ford
Reynolds Price
Cormac McCarthy
J.D. Salinger? (He’s alive. Or aliveish.)
Doubtless my literate readers will have other suggestions. Remember, though, that the award is for a lifetime of writing achievement, not for a few well-known books, so maybe Salinger doesn’t qualify. Don’t forget, Norman Mailer is dead.
So, while you’re placing your bets and trying to slake your anticipation, I’ll tell you that the winner of the first Library of Congress award for lifetime achievement in fiction is –
Herman Wouk. 
You’re all smacking your foreheads and going, “Duh, well, yeah, of course, Herman Wouk. ‘The Caine Mutiny.’ ‘Marjorie Morningstar.’ ‘Youngblood Hawke.’ Those mini-series about WWII.”
Perhaps the intention is to present the award for longevity. Wouk, born May 27, 1915, happens to be 93, which makes him 16 years older than the next oldest possibility, E.L. Doctorow (b. Jan. 6, 1931). In fact, the award could simply be made each year to the next author in the chronological line, eliminating the cheap and petty element of suspense. There wouldn’t even have to be a ceremony. A certificate could be emailed to the winner. In that case, the roster would look like this:
Wouk (May 27, 1915)
Doctorow (Jan. 6, 1931)
Morrison (Feb. 18, 1931)
Updike (March 18, 1932)
Gaines (Jan 15, 1933)
Price (Feb. 1, 1933)
Roth (March 19, 1933)
McCarthy (July 20, 1933, a big year for writers!)
DeLillo (Nov. 20, 1936)
Pynchon (May 8, 1937)
Oates (June 16, 1938)
Tyler (Oct. 25, 1941)
Ford (Feb. 16, 1944)
See, that takes care of the award for the next 12 years, assuming that these authors all live that long. Pesky ol’ Death. The Library of Congress comittee doesn’t even have to have another meeting. They should have called me first.
“Spook Country,” by William Gibson(2007, Penguin Group, 373 pages, $15, paperback)
I confess that I’m one of many people who have not read William Gibson’s first novel, “Neuromancer,” so I had little more than the cover art and blurbs on which to build preconceptions when I sat down to read this book.
“Neuromancer,” according to Wikipedia, is one of the seminal works of cyberpunk science fiction, some of which I’ve enjoyed very much.
But “Spook Country” is not science fiction. In fact, it more resembles highly tech-oriented noir.
The book begins with a former rock musician — still famous in the story — named Hollis Henry, who is trying to get started as a journalist. In her first big assignment, she visits the scene of River Phoenix’s death with an artist who asks her to don a visor that looks like a welder’s face-guard. She then sees a three-dimensional virtual-reality recreation of Phoenix’s death scene.
This brings us into the concept of linking virtual reality with global positioning systems, creating the possibility of somehow inhabiting a world that is not at all what it seems.
“The Secret History of the American Empire: The Truth About Economic Hit Men, Jackals, and How to Change the World,” by John Perkins(2007, Penguin Group, 365 pages, paperback, $15)
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If you had a hard time relating to Michelle Obama’s modesty with regard to American accomplishments, this book may surprise you.
In this tome, you get a crystal-clear peek at how rapaciously U.S. corporations have exploited and abused peoples and resources on every continent of the planet — except Antarctica and Europe.
Here’s a story told to Perkins by someone claiming to be “jackal” (a CIA-sponsored mercenary) named “Brett”:
“I walked into El Presidente’s office two days after he was elected and congratulated him.
“He sat behind that big desk grinning at me like the Cheshire Cat.
“I stuck my left hand into my jacket pocket and said, ‘Mr. President, in here I got a couple hundred million dollars for you and your family, if you play the game — you know, be kind to my friends who run the oil companies, treat your Uncle Sam good.’ Then I stepped closer, reached my right hand into the other pocket, bent down next to his face, and whispered,’ In here I got a gun and a bullet with your name on it — in case you decide to keep your campaign promises.’
Walter Kirn certainly got up on the curmudgeon’s side of the bed the day he wrote his review of James Wood’s new book, “How Fiction Works” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24). The cover of The New York Times Book Review is generally reserved for raves, but on August 17, Kirn came out swinging. His disdain barely conceals his rage. Que pasa?
This is the first review I have read in which the reviewer mocks the author of the book about literature and writing for being too well-read. Wood, a well-known literary critic, essayist and reviewer who writes for The New Yorker, mentions at the beginning of “How Fiction Works” that the books he cites (94 novels and a handful of short stories) are from his own library; he didn’t go to a public or university library or order anything from Amazon, a fact that seems to inflame Kirn’s sarcasm. “Wood’s study must be vast, with well-stocked shelves, judging by [Wood’s] inarguable erudition,” he writes, making erudition sound like a particularly loathsome STD. Wood, says Kirn. “drops his quotations and references as copiously, easily and freely as a man on a bench in Central Park scattering cups of birdseed.” How one could compose a book about how fiction (or anything else) works without using quotations and references defeats my imagination, and I would certainly hope that the author of such a book knew what he was talking about and possessed the background in reading and thinking — call it erudition — to write convincingly.
Having “the whole Western canon at his disposal, apparently” and conveying a “tone of genteel condescension,” the “vicarish” and “sequestered,” Wood, who possesses “a donnish, finicky persona,” “flashes the Burberry lining of his jacket whenever he rises from his armchair to fetch another Harvard Classic.” Ouch, talk about condescension! This is getting really personal. I Googled as hard as I could but I couldn’t find evidence that Wood, known for damaging reviews, attacked one of Kirn’s novels or dissed him personally. No, Kirn just freaking despises Wood and his book, and he makes no distinction between them.
Among Wood’s sins is that his author-heroes are “semimonastic introverts” like Henry James and Gustave Flaubert, writers who refuse to “let themselves be distracted and overwhelmed by the roar of the streets, the voices of the crowd,” in the way that one of Kirn’s heroes, David Foster Wallace, does (according to Kirn). I have to say that, having struggled through David Foster Wallace’s turgid prose and sophomoric satire, I think his writing bears as much resemblance to the authentic roar of the streets and voices of the crowds as Dr. Scholls does to Dr. Faustus. And what nonsense this is when Wood happily praises the exuberance of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, the sneaky wit of Jane Austen and Muriel Spark.
You have to give Laurie Notaro credit for some fun book titles. Her latest one “The Idiot Girl and the Flaming Tantrum of Death” (Villard Books, $20) ranks with her other classics “I love Everyone (and Other Atrocious Lies)” and my personal favorite: “We Thought You Would be Prettier.”
Her book is a collection of random stories from her life. A few are hilarious. A few are dull. Some are downright disgusting. There are chapters that should be skipped or at least read when you aren’t eating or about to because they are about some nasty topics such as poop. Read the rest of this entry »
Quick — take a look around your computer. What do you see?
Coffee cup stains, post-it notes, photos haphazardly taped to the wall, a cube wall overflowing with colorful leaves of paper, newspaper clippings, stickers, schedules and calendars, super hero action figures, photos and printouts of your favorite musicians, Far Side comics ripped out of a date book and taped to the wall, unopened bottles of juice, an ancient jar of peanuts, a bottle of body spray, a Mardi Gras mask and beads, fingernail clippers, a bottle of eye drops, an empty bottle of lotion, a tray of pennies, lots of dust, a stray ring and bracelet, a handwritten list of phone numbers, a stack of yellowed newspapers, an empty Altoids tin, an Apple sticker placed on top of a Dell logo, and wires wires wires everywhere you look?
Or do you see a pristine desk with a manicured inbox, push pins neatly aligned along your cube wall, a few carefully placed framed photos on your computer, and not a speck of dirt or dust to be found?
Or something completely different?
Sam Gosling, super snooper and author of Snoop: What your Stuff Says About You ($26, Basic Books), could look at your surroundings and tell you a lot about your personality — way beyond whether or not you’re a compulsively slobby hoarder (ahem) or an anal-retentive neat freak. Gosling has formulated fairly scientific ways of observing people’s surroundings — especially those they control and take pride in — and uses the data to determine a person’s level of openness, friendliness, neuroticism, originality, agreeableness, and more.
And best of all? He outlines lots of ways to help the common observer become an expert snooper, which can help anyone who cares to pay attention to the clues navigate the choppy waters of personal interaction.
