Pg. 69: Ravi Batra's "The New Golden Age"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Ravi Batra's The New Golden Age.

About the book, from the publisher:

In The New Golden Age, bestselling author and economist Ravi Batra identifies the roadblocks to economic prosperity--and what we need to do to overcome them. Bringing the same insight and expertise that made books like The Downfall of Capitalism and Communism international bestsellers, Batra takes on falling minimum wages, corporate scandals, rocketing oil prices, and many of the other crises facing the world economy. He also offers an expansive, optimistic vision of how the international community can address them and bring about something historically unprecedented: true global economic prosperity.

Among the early praise for The New Golden Age:

"The analysis is keen and provocative, and the conclusions unorthodox as ever."
--Publishers Weekly

"Dr. Batra vividly portrays the way in which public disgust for corruption, both corporate and federal, is becoming a serious force for political change."
--Dr. W. Curtiss Priest, Director, Center for Information, Technology, & Society, MIT

Among the praise for Ravi Batra:

"When it comes to the bottom line so beloved of economists, one can learn a lot about events by thinking about them in cyclical regularities, of which Batra gives a novel and brilliant exposition."
--Lester C. Thurow

"Ravi Batra has made an outstanding reputation in the United States as an international economic theorist in the best Western tradition."
--Leonard Silk, New York Times

Ravi Batra is the author of Greenspan's Fraud as well as the international bestsellers as The Downfall of Capitalism and Communism, The Great Depression of 1990, and The Myth of Free Trade. He is professor of economics at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

The Page 69 Test: The New Golden Age.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Ondaatje: 5 most important books

In the April 23, 2007 issue of Newsweek, Booker Prize-winning novelist Michael Ondaatje named his five most important books ... after limiting "himself to 20th-century works and assum[ing] Faulkner, Cather and García Márquez went without saying."

Read about all five titles.

Ondaatje also picked a book and panned a book using other criteria:

A classic that, on rereading, was disappointing:

Ideal Marriage by Dr. Th. H. Van De Velde. A marriage manual. I stole it from my mother's shelf. It was a turn-on when I was 14. It's not a turn-on at 74.

The book you care most about having your children read:

My own memoir, A Writer's Life — because I want them to know me as I see myself.

Ondaatje's new novel, Divisadero, is out this month.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Bill Cameron's "Lost Dog"

Today's feature at the Page 69 Test: Bill Cameron's debut mystery, Lost Dog.

About the book, from the author's website:

Peter McKrall is at a crossroads — out of work, fighting a klepto habit, and trying to figure out his next move. Life takes an unexpected turn when a search for his niece’s stuffed dog leads him to something else entirely: a bullet-riddled corpse. Talking to reporters lands Peter on the local news, which turns out to be a dangerous spotlight. And now Darla, the troubled daughter of the victim, is reaching out to him — but can she be trusted? When a second murder takes place and evidence is planted in his trash, the cops dredge up Peter’s painful history. The only ray of sunshine in this harrowing nightmare is Ruby Jane, whose warm smile melts the winter chill.

An unwitting player in a bizarre chain of events, Peter has no idea that the deranged killer is after him — until he takes a shot at Ruby Jane.

- + - + -

Set against the sodden backdrop of Portland, Oregon, Lost Dog tells of the intersection of one man's struggle against and another's embrace of powerful and self-destructive impulses.

Among the praise for Lost Dog:

"Lost Dog is an excellent debut filled with suspense, surprises, and memorable characters — and it captures Portland's quirkiness particularly well. I predict we'll be hearing more from the talented Bill Cameron."
--Alafair Burke, author of Dead Connection

“Lost Dog by Bill Cameron is a beautifully written and masterful work of character-driven crime fiction. One of the most fascinating and compelling main characters I've read in a long time. A bad guy real enough to smell. A plot that fits together like a puzzle.

“I was starving for a personal story. Give me real people. Give me a story with truth. As soon as I started Lost Dog my heart began to beat faster. This was the book I'd been craving.

“Bill Cameron manages to deftly strip away the distance. Not only does he give us a knock-out plot, he gives us real people in real settings. He gives us characters we care about, characters we know and want to know. And like real life, the darkest moments often contain humor. I laughed out loud several times.

“Lost Dog is a heart-stopping, tightly-woven debut by a remarkable new crime-fiction writer. Thank you, Bill Cameron.”
--Anne Frasier, USA Today Bestselling author of Pale Immortal and Hush

“In the chill of Portland at Christmastime, Bill Cameron weaves a story of murder, human frailty and the frightening reality of coincidence. Peter McKrall is in the wrong place at the wrong time, searching for a lost dog. Instead, he finds a dead body, and it begins a chain of events that lead McKrall, weakened by circumstances, into a web of violence that will force him to find his strength. Bill writes a compelling, layered tale with graceful prose, realistic scenery and dead-on dialogue. I really enjoyed Lost Dog. Bill Cameron can add me to his list of fans.”
--Julia Buckley, author of The Dark Backward

Read an excerpt from Lost Dog and visit Cameron's website -- where you can view a video trailer for the novel -- and his blog.

The Page 69 Test: Lost Dog.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jerome Groopman's list

Jerome Groopman is a cancer and AIDS researcher, a professor at Harvard Medical School, and writer for The New Yorker. His latest book is How Doctors Think.

He came up with "The List" for last week's The Week magazine.

One title from it:

The Last of the Just by Andre Schwarz-Bart

This epic history of a family dedicated to doing good ends tragically with the Holocaust, and powerfully portrays the great crime of genocide. When I was a young man, this book reinforced my commitment not to ignore injustices against the innocent, regardless of race, creed, or country of origin.

Read more about Groopman's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

"What is Eric Rauchway reading?

The current featured author at Writers Read: Eric Rauchway.

Rauchway is a history professor at the University of California, Davis, and the author of Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America and, more recently, Blessed Among Nations: How the World Made America.

A couple of the several titles he mentioned he was reading:

Ann Hagedorn's Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America, 1919.

David Silbey's A War of Frontier and Empire: The Philippine-American War, 1899-1902. (See the Page 69 Test entry for Silbey's book.)

Read more about what Rauchway has been reading.

And check out his contributions to the scholars' group blog, "Open University."

The Page 69 Test: Blessed Among Nations: How the World Made America.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Cait Murphy's "Crazy '08"

Today's feature at the Page 99 Test: Cait Murphy's Crazy '08: How a Cast of Cranks, Rogues, Boneheads, and Magnates Created the Greatest Year in Baseball History.

About the book, from the publisher:

From the perspective of 2007, the unintentional irony of Chance's boast is manifest — these days, the question is when will the Cubs ever win a game they have to have. In October 1908, though, no one would have laughed: The Cubs were, without doubt, baseball's greatest team — the first dynasty of the 20th century.

Crazy '08 recounts the 1908 season — the year when Peerless Leader Frank Chance's men went toe to toe to toe with John McGraw and Christy Mathewson's New York Giants and Honus Wagner's Pittsburgh Pirates in the greatest pennant race the National League has ever seen. The American League has its own three-cornered pennant fight, and players like Cy Young, Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, and the egregiously crooked Hal Chase ensured that the junior circuit had its moments. But it was the National League's — and the Cubs' — year.

Crazy '08, however, is not just the exciting story of a great season. It is also about the forces that created modern baseball, and the America that produced it. In 1908, crooked pols run Chicago's First Ward, and gambling magnates control the Yankees. Fans regularly invade the field to do handstands or argue with the umps; others shoot guns from rickety grandstands prone to burning. There are anarchists on the loose and racial killings in the town that made Lincoln. On the flimsiest of pretexts, General Abner Doubleday becomes a symbol of Americanism, and baseball's own anthem, "Take Me Out to the Ballgame," is a hit.

Picaresque and dramatic, 1908 is a season in which so many weird and wonderful things happen that it is somehow unsurprising that a hairpiece, a swarm of gnats, a sudden bout of lumbago, and a disaster down in the mines all play a role in its outcome. And sometimes the events are not so wonderful at all. There are several deaths by baseball, and the shadow of corruption creeps closer to the heart of baseball — the honesty of the game itself. Simply put, 1908 is the year that baseball grew up.

Oh, and it was the last time the Cubs won the World Series.

Among the reviews and endorsements for Crazy '08:

“Crazy '08 is a lovely look (but one as searching as it is affectionate) about the dandiest season and the goofiest ballsters there ever were. As the players in 1908 played, so does Cait Murphy write with pluck and ginger.”
--Frank Deford, author of The Entitled

“The joy of Murphy's book is that it transports us to a magical time in the history of baseball, when the sport was marching toward modernity (the rules were essentially the same as they are today, and some of the all-time greats roamed the field), but its rough-hewn 19th Century origins remained largely intact (ethnic Irish and German names filled the lineups, and players, umpires and fans routinely fought each other). Murphy provides concise accounts of such topics as ballpark design, the history of scoreboards and baseball as a business. And she reminds us that, for all the glory that was the times, "baseball in this era suffered a surfeit of psychic torment and premature death." From 1900 to 1920, some two dozen players committed suicide.”
--Chicago Tribune

"Entertaining and meticulously researched."
--Wall Street Journal

"[A] rollicking tour ... will fascinate students of baseball ... cause today’s Cub fans to experience an unaccustomed feeling -- pride..."
--New York Times Book Review

"It's been almost a century since the loopy shenanigans of 1908 that produced what Fortune magazine editor Cait Murphy calls "the year that baseball comes of age," but the resultant drama has hardly faded with time. Although baseball books tend to sag with nostalgia, Murphy's wisecracking yarn digs right into the era's brawling, vivid ugliness with little regard for such niceties, and is all the better for it. Her book is so rife with corruption, greed, stupidity and downright weirdness that it makes today's sport of sanctimony and clean behavior look positively sleepy in comparison. This isn't surprising, given that 1908 was not just the last year that the shockingly victorious Chicago Cubs won the World Series, but also the year when a game would be called a tie through sheer Rashomon-like confusion and when a game day riot would take the lives of two people. The titanic matches between the rival Cubs and New York Giants are thrilling enough, but what really makes Murphy's book an addictive pleasure is the joy the author takes in the colorful asides where she fills in the chaotic blanks of an America discovering not just the joy of its national pastime but its very character."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Visit Cait Murphy's website and read an excerpt from Crazy '08.

The Page 99 Test: Crazy '08.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Paul Toth's "Fishnet"

Today's feature at the Page 99 Test: Paul Toth's Fishnet.

About the book, from the publisher:

If a man believes he’s sinking, can he muster the strength to resurface?

Maurice Melnick, failed painter, is lost in the underwater world of his imagination. Struggling with the notion that he is devolving, Maurice wants nothing more than to paint a portrait of his wife Sheila. But Sheila’s found the self she abandoned in marriage, an apparition who wants to come home for good. All the while, their post-industrial town of Mercy, California seems to succumb to a decades-old curse wrought by Mercy’s own ancestor. Can a marriage be rekindled alongside a crumbling and barren coast?

Among the praise for Fishnet:

“Toth is a smart writer with a natural gift for dialogue and creative introspection. Fishnet will make you smile, laugh, feel, and think. Ultimately it will leave you hopeful.”
—Charlie Stella

“An imaginative and stirring book! Fishnet is like stepping into a Salvador Dali painting.”
—Susan Henderson

"Thankfully, Toth is a talented writer interested in exploring stories you've already heard, in ways you've never expected. He's prone to detaching a familiar story from its moorings and pushing it out to sea, watching it float into murkier waters. Fishnet is no exception... It's astounding how much pathos Toth packs into this strange, short novel. While the reader is busy contemplating the meaning of Mercy's decline and Maurice's imaginings, Toth slips in devastating sentences, the kind you hope to never hear about your own relationship."
—Jonathan Messinger, TimeOut Chicago

Paul Toth lives in Michigan. His first novel is Fizz, and his short fiction credits include The Barcelona Review, Night Train and The Mississippi Review Online.

His latest project, a multimedia exploration of the connection between Hitler's love life and the central catastrophe of the 20th Century, is available in a signed, limited edition.

The Page 99 Test: Fishnet.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: "More Sex is Safer Sex"

Today's feature at the Page 69 Test: Steven E. Landsburg's More Sex is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics.

About the book, from the publisher:

Steven Landsburg's writings are living proof that economics need not be "the dismal science." Readers of The Armchair Economist and his columns in Slate magazine know that he can make economics not only fun but fascinating, as he searches for the reasons behind the odd facts we face in our daily lives. In More Sex Is Safer Sex, he brings his witty and razor-sharp analysis to the many ways that our individually rational decisions can combine into some truly weird collective results -- and he proposes hilarious and serious ways to fix just about everything.

When you stand up at the ballpark in order to see better, you make a rational decision. When everyone else does it too, the results, of course, are lousy. But this is just the tip of the iceberg of individual sanity and collective madness. Did you know that some people may actually increase the spread of sexually transmitted diseases when they avoid casual sex? Do you know why tall people earn more money than shorter competitors? (Hint: it isn't just unfair, unconscious prejudice.) Do you know why it makes no sense for you to give charitable donations to more than one organization?

Landsburg's solutions to the many ways that modern life is unfair or inefficient are both jaw-dropping and maddeningly defensible. We should encourage people to cut in line at water fountains on hot days. We should let firefighters keep any property they rescue from burning houses. We should encourage more people to act like Scrooge, because misers are just as generous as philanthropists.

Best of all are Landsburg's commonsense solutions to the political problems that plague our democracy. We should charge penalties to jurors if they convict a felon who is later exonerated. We should let everyone vote in two congressional districts: their own, and any other one of their choice. While we're at it, we should redraw the districts according to the alphabetical lists of all voters, rather than by geography. We should pay FDA commissioners with shares of pharmaceutical company stocks, and pay our president with a diversified portfolio of real estate from across the country.

Why do parents of sons stay married more often than parents who have only daughters? Why does early motherhood not only correlate with lower income, but actually cause it? Why do we execute murderers but not the authors of vicious computer viruses? The lesson of this fascinating, fun, and endlessly provocative book is twofold: many apparently very odd behaviors have logical explanations, and many apparently logical behaviors make no sense whatsoever.

Among the praise for More Sex is Safer Sex:

"Steve Landsburg proves once again that he is better than anyone else at making economics interesting to noneconomists. Landsburg is provocative and playful in his mission to demonstrate how an understanding of economics will change the way you live your daily life. I loved this book."
-- Steven Levitt, author of Freakonomics

"Long before the 'pop economists' there was Steven Landsburg, writing funny, jargon-free, shocking, and true essays on our material circumstances. But Landsburg knows something that other authors of bestsellers on the subject don't. He knows everything. Economics is not the study of money; it's the study of value. Everything is determined by our values. The science of everything is what economics is. And here, in More Sex, what the reader will find is -- everything."
-- P.J. O'Rourke

"Steve Landsburg is one of my favorite economics writers, and his new book is no exception. While I don't always agree with him, he usually gets me thinking, and he always entertains."
-- Greg Mankiw, former Chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers and author of Principles of Economics

Visit the author's website and read an excerpt from More Sex is Safer Sex.

Landsburg's other books include Fair Play: What Your Child Can Teach You About Economics, Values, and the Meaning of Life and The Armchair Economist.

Read Landsburg's "Everday Economics" column in Slate.

The Page 69 Test: More Sex is Safer Sex.

--Marshal Zeringue

Erica Wagner's literary top 10

Literary editor of the London Times Erica Wagner took the Pulp Net quiz.

A couple of her answers:

Best short story I’ve ever read
‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’ by Herman Melville

Best film of the book I’ve seen
David Lean’s film of Great Expectations.

Read more from Wagner's quiz.

Erica Wagner is the author of Seizure, a novel published in April 2007 by W.W. Norton. She is also the author of a book of short stories (Gravity) and a book about Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath (Ariel’s Gift).

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Steve Kronen reading?

Steve Kronen has been a fellow at Bread Loaf, and the Sewanee Writers' Conference, received two Florida Arts Council grants, and the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. His first book, Empirical Evidence, won the Contemporary Poetry Series prize and was published by the University of Georgia Press in 1992. Splendor, his most recent book, was published by BOA Editions in May 2006.

His poems have appeared in The New Republic, The American Scholar, Poetry, Agni, APR, The Georgia Review, Ploughshares, Slate, and The Threepenny Review.

Visit Writers Read and see what he was reading not so long ago. His list includes the presidential autobiography about which Gore Vidal concluded: "It is simply not possible to read [these] memoirs without realizing that the author is a man of first-rate intelligence."

Visit Steve Kronen's website and read some of his poems that are available online.

Read -- or listen to him read-- his poem, "November Symphony" in Slate.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Perfect Hell," the movie

John Nadler's most recent book is A Perfect Hell: The True Story of the Black Devils, the Forefathers of the Special Forces.

I asked him who he would cast in the movie or miniseries version of the book. Here's part of his answer:

My book is based on the WWII exploits of the Black Devils, a legendary commando outfit. An earlier popular history of this unit was The Devil's Brigade, which became a classic 1960s war movie starring William Holden and Cliff Robertson.

Both men were class acts, utterly irreplaceable. But whom would I pick for a 2007 re-make?

Read on.

Visit Nadler's official website and his group blog, Contemporary Nomad.

Also see: The Page 69 Test: A Perfect Hell.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: "The Art of Surrender"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Robin Wagner-Pacifici's The Art of Surrender: Decomposing Sovereignty at Conflict's End.

About the book, from the publisher:

How do we know when a war ends? For many, the resolution of a conflict comes not with the last traces of smoke left on the battlefield, but with the formal ceremonies of surrender: possession and repossession, the signing of treaties, and the pomp and circumstance that mark them. Historically, most conflicts have ended with such rituals. But, as Robin Wagner-Pacifici reveals in The Art of Surrender, they should not be seen as merely a matter of giving up. They also offer ways of holding back and signal early fault lines that give rise to later undoings and conflicts.

The Art of Surrender explores these ritual concessions as acts of warfare, performances of submission, demonstrations of power, and representations of shifting, unstable worlds. Wagner-Pacifici analyzes three significant military surrenders in the history of warfare — the Thirty Years' War of the seventeenth century, the American Civil War, and World War II — through the use of period documents and forms, maps, literature, witness accounts, photographs, and paintings that were left as proof of victory and defeat. In her analyses of such archival material and iconic works of art, she considers the limits of sovereignty at conflict's end, showing how the ways we concede loss can be as important as the ways we claim victory.

Among the praise for the book:

"Robin Wagner-Pacifici shows that defeat is never simply the inability to go on fighting, but a form of social organization orchestrated by its own rules. She makes beautiful use of visual and textual evidence for three archetypal cases of the Western tradition of surrender - Breda, Appomattox, and Tokyo Bay - thereby making also an outstanding contribution on the politics of painting and photography. This is a book that would delight the ghost of Georg Simmel."
--Randall Collins, University of Pennsylvania

"This book is a fine piece of cultural sociology: smart, sound, and original. It is also particularly timely because it deals with sovereignty and surrender when the world political map and rights of self-government are matters of violent as well as political struggle. Robin Wagner-Pacifici peels away layer after layer of the arts of diplomacy, political ritual, and warfare as they come to light in critical moments of surrender."
--Chandra Mukerji, University of California, Davis

Robin E. Wagner-Pacifici is Gil and Frank Mustin Professor of Sociology at Swarthmore College. Her previous books include Theorizing the Standoff: Contingency in Action, (Cambridge University Press) and Discourse and Destruction: The City of Philadelphia Versus MOVE (University of Chicago Press).

The Page 99 Test: The Art of Surrender.

--Marshal Zeringue

Many novels, few adaptations

There is an article in today's Independent (U.K.) about film adaptations of novels. It reads in part:

Movies gobble books up and spew them out at an alarming rate. Already this year audiences have seen screen versions of Zoë Heller's Notes on a Scandal, Giles Foden's The Last King of Scotland, Jon Spence's Becoming Jane Austen, Dito Montiel's superb memoir A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints and Joseph Kanon's The Good German. Later in the year comes a film version of Ian McEwan's Atonement, while book-based franchises from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix to The Bourne Ultimatum will be joined by the first part of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, The Golden Compass.

Books provide filmmakers with ready-made plots on which to base screenplays (useful when plagiarism claims start to fly), and a proven audience. But unless they are global mega-sellers like Dan Brown, J K Rowling or Michael Crichton, the actual authors are lower on the food chain than the screenwriter, and if you think they are respected, watch Sunset Boulevard or The Player.

Read on.

Appended to the end of the article: lists of the five best adaptations and five turkeys.

The turkeys:

1. The Bonfire of the Vanities:

Tom Wolfe's sprawling satire on 1980s America became an unwatchable dogs' dinner in Brian De Palma's hands.

2. Captain Corelli's Mandolin:

Whoever thought the unsubtle Nicolas Cage would be a good choice for lead role needs to up their medication.

3. War of the Worlds:

Tom Cruise brings new meaning to the phrase 'disaster movie'.

4. The Black Dahlia:

Brian De Palma proves once more that great books can make terrible films... or is it just him?

5. Bram Stoker's Dracula:

So bad it's good. Memorable for Gary Oldman's bad hair day and Keanu Reeves' hilarious English accent. laughing. As revenge goes, it beats the naughty step.

--Marshal Zeringue

Books by or about musical eccentrics

Bob Stanley of the pop band St Etienne wrote the "critic's chart" for books by or about "pop eccentrics" for the London Times.

One title on the chart:

Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye

David Ritz

Marvin lives in a tent on the beach, then moves to Ostend on a whim.

Read about another book on the list -- "Less a memoir than a psychological thriller" -- by the rocker who was shot (in the leg) when he tried to chase down a purse snatcher in my hometown in 2004.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Patrick Griffin's "American Leviathan"

This weekend's feature at the Page 69 Test: Patrick Griffin's American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and Revolutionary Frontier.

About the book, from the publisher:

The war that raged along America’s frontier during the period of the American Revolution was longer, bloodier, and arguably more revolutionary than what transpired on the Atlantic coast.

Between 1763 and 1795 westerners not only participated in a War of Independence but engaged in a revolution that ushered in fundamental changes in social relations, political allegiances, and assumptions about the relationship between individuals and society. On the frontier, the process of forging sovereignty and citizens was stripped down to its essence. Settlers struggled with the very stuff of revolution: violence, uncertainty, disorder, and the frenzied competition to remake the fabric of society. In so doing, they were transformed from deferential subjects to self-sovereign citizens as the British Empire gave way to the American nation. But something more fundamental was at work. The violent nature of the contest to reconstitute sovereignty produced a revolutionary settlement in which race and citizenship went hand in hand. The common people demanded as much, and the state delivered. As westerners contended in a Hobbesian world, they also created some of the myths that made America American.

Patrick Griffin recaptures a chaotic world of settlers, Indians, speculators, British regulars, and American and state officials, vying with one another to remake the West during its most formative period.

Among the early praise for the book:

"In this book, Griffin aims to re-conceptualize the American Revolution in the West and his explanation of the ways Hobbesian disorder and violence on the American frontier escalated and laid the basis for the acceptability of federal state power in the West is very convincing."
—Gordon S. Wood, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Radicalism of the American Revolution

"Griffin's erudite account places ordinary settlers of America's frontier at the center of 18th-century political revolution. The British Empire's hold on the western edge of colonies like Pennsylvania was always tenuous, suggests the University of Virginia's Griffin (The People with No Name). The frontier was beset by violence between Indians and white settlers, and the latter thought Britain appeased the Indians at their expense. These settlers' disgust with the inadequacies of imperial policy, says Griffin, fomented the American Revolution, a titanic political clash that ultimately gave ordinary frontiersmen new rights. But they gained those rights at the expense of Native Americans — whom they identified as irreconcilably other. Tensions continued after the revolution. The fragile new American government was unable to enforce order on the frontier, and settlers in the Ohio valley and other border regions believed the state had to eradicate Indians to secure a stable and safe society. (As Griffin puts it with elegant bluntness, the frontiersmen were building a commonwealth "on the bod[ies] of... dead Indian[s].") Griffin judiciously weaves analysis into riveting stories of riots and unrest, and weds attention to race and marginalized people with traditional political and military history.
—Publishers Weekly

Patrick Griffin's earlier book is The People with No Name: Ireland’s Ulster Scots, America’s Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689-1764 (Princeton University Press, 2001).

The Page 69 Test: American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and Revolutionary Frontier.

--Marshal Zeringue

Scientific works that are also literature

John Gribbin, a visiting fellow in astronomy at the University of Sussex and the author of The Fellowship -- a new book which deals with the 17th-century scientific revolution, named a "five best" list of "scientific works [that] are also literature of a high order" for Opinion Journal.

The most recently-published title on the list:

Six Easy Pieces by Richard P. Feynman

Something of a self-indulgence to conclude with. One of the biggest influences on my scientific career, and later my career as a popularizer of science, was the multivolume "Feynman Lectures on Physics," which appeared in the early 1960s. "Six Easy Pieces," the epitome of that masterwork, really does offer an easy guide to the essence of physics--and science in general. Feynman explores the most fundamental scientific theories--the structure and behavior of atoms, quantum mechanics and gravity. These fundamentals ought to be as well known to intelligent people as Shakespeare, Mozart and Picasso. The material in the book is essentially a transcript of Feynman lecturing (you can even get the lectures themselves on a CD to accompany the book) and comes across like a wise friend giving you the inside story on a subject he loves. More than 350 years after William Gilbert, Feynman never missed an opportunity to hammer home what remains the most essential feature of science: No matter how much you may love your pet idea, no matter how beautiful it is mathematically, "if it disagrees with experiment, then it is wrong!"

Read about the title on Gribbin's list that Samuel Pepys called "the most ingenious book that ever I read in my life."

Learn more about John Gribbin's The Fellowship: Gilbert, Bacon, Harvey, Wren, Newton, and the Story of the Scientific Revolution.

--Marshal Zeringue

Writers' charms

The Guardian runs excerpts from How I Write: The Secret Lives Of Authors, edited by Dan Crowe with Philip Oltermann.

What practice or talisman do accomplished writers use to jumpstart their creativity? Chocolate works for Douglas Coupland and "a large Piranesi engraving of the ruins of the Baths Of Diocletian in Rome" inspires Alan Hollinghurst. Jane Smiley follows Archimedes when writer's block hits.

One of my favorite writers, Nicholson Baker, has a more pragmatic tool in his writing kit:

Some years ago I bought an industrial dispenser pack of 200 pairs of Mack's earplugs from earplugstore.com. Mostly, though, I buy them from the drug store. Recently, Mack's began offering them in orange, which is less disgusting than white.

I can sit anywhere, in any loud place, and work. Everything becomes 20 feet farther away than it really is. The chirping, barking, jingling cash-drawer of a world is out of reach, and therefore more precious.

You must have a good seal. When you unstick your thumb from a jammed-in plug, your eardrum will make a tiny, silent cry of pain, like a word in Arabic. Then you know you have a good seal.

Read the excerpts in the Guardian.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: "The Genizah at the House of Shepher"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Tamar Yellin's The Genizah at the House of Shepher.

About the book:

Beginning with a search for the ten lost tribes and ending in an attic, where lies an important bible which has been missing for seventy-nine years, The Genizah at the House of Shepher explores themes of history and myth, heritage and selfhood from a keenly contemporary perspective.

Genizah (the Hebrew word, meaning literally "hiding place," refers to a depository for old or damaged sacred documents) is the saga of a Jerusalem family stretching over a hundred and forty-five years and four generations, but it is also a thriller about a missing biblical codex and the search for the true text of the Bible. Returning to her grandparents' house in Jerusalem after a long absence, Shulamit, a biblical scholar, becomes embroiled in a family feud over possession of the so-called Shepher Codex, a mysterious and valuable manuscript of the Pentateuch which has been discovered in the attic. In unravelling the origins of the Codex Shulamit uncovers not only her ancestors' history but is obliged to reconsider her own past, her present, and ultimately, her choices for the future.

Moving from family comedy to pathos to Talmudic-style fable, the tale of the family Shepher, their aspirations, feuds and love affairs, is a large canvas novel of exile and belonging, displacement and the struggle for identity.

Among the praise for the novel:

"Yellin's first novel is impossible to put down ... this novel [has] beauty, deep love, and a timelessness that will likely make it a classic."
- Booklist (starred review)

"A fascinating, labyrinthine journey."
- Kirkus Reviews

"Filled with myth, mystery and history."
- Library Journal

"Warm and engrossing, rich with historical detail and unmet yearning."
- Publishers Weekly

"A Jewish-style Da Vinci Code saga."
- Ynetnews.com

Visit Tamar Yellin's website and read the opening chapters of The Genizah at the House of Shepher.

The Page 99 Test: The Genizah at the House of Shepher.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Rebecca Kaiser Gibson reading?

Writer and poet Rebecca Kaiser Gibson has had work published in Agni, Field, The Harvard Review, The Boston Phoenix, Mothering, Antigonish, Northwest Review and Verse Daily, MARGIE, and in Slate, and forthcoming in an anthology called Cadence of Hooves.

She has published two chapbooks of poetry through Roundy Wells Press, Admit the Peacock and Inside the Exhibition.

She has written reviews for The Boston Review of Books and Pleiades.

Visit Writers Read and see what she was reading not so long ago.

Read -- or listen to her read-- her poem, "Clearing the House," in Slate.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Susan Coll's "Acceptance"

Today's feature at the Page 69 Test: Susan Coll's Acceptance.

About the book, from the publisher:

A comic chronicle of a year in the life in the college admissions cycle

It’s spring break of junior year and the college admissions hysteria is setting in. “AP” Harry (so named for the unprecedented number of advanced placement courses he has taken) and his mother take a detour from his first choice, Harvard, to visit Yates, a liberal arts school in the Northeast that is enjoying a surge in popularity as a result of a statistical error that landed it on the top-fifty list of the U.S. News & World Report rankings. There, on Yates’s dilapidated grounds, Harry runs into two of his classmates from Verona High, an elite public school in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. There’s Maya Kaluantharana, a gifted athlete whose mediocre SAT scores so alarm her family that they declare her learning disabled, and Taylor Rockefeller, Harry’s brooding neighbor, who just wants a good look at the dormitory bathrooms.

With the human spirit of Tom Perrotta and the engaging honesty of Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep, Susan Coll reveals the frantic world of college admissions, where kids recalibrate their GPAs based on daily quizzes, families relocate to enhance the chance for Ivy League slots, and everyone is looking for the formula for admittance. Meanwhile, Yates admissions officer Olivia Sheraton sifts through applications looking for something — anything — to distinguish one applicant from the next. For all, the price of admission requires compromise; for a few, the ordeal blossoms into an unexpected journey of discovery.

Among the praise for Acceptance:

"Having just sent one kid off to college and with a second now preparing to apply, I had shivers of recognition again and again as I read Acceptance. Fortunately, each shiver came along with its corresponding several smiles and chuckles. Susan Coll has written a dead-on satire that's also full of heart, which is a rare achievement."
—Kurt Andersen, author of Heyday

"I don’t know why anyone would bother with those big, ugly college admissions manuals when a novel as smart and savvy as Acceptance can give us the same tips, with laughs. Susan Coll could make hell fun — and she does."
—Marilyn Johnson, author of The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries

"Acceptance is A+ entertainment -- witty, clever and unpretentious. Excellent reading for all, but a MUST READ for anyone with teenage children."
—Anita Shreve

"A cheerfully pointed satire about the college-admissions process at a suburban Washington, D.C., high school where students and/or their parents have Ivy League aspirations…. While readers will root for these kids, Coll's affection for her targets does not detract from her bite."
—Kirkus

"Like Jane Smiley's Moo, this latest from Coll is a hilarious novel about academe, following three high school students, their parents, and one dean of admissions in the year before the students' graduation… This extremely engaging story about the high-stakes, upper-middle-class world of college admissions is poised to become a popular book club
selection."
—Library Journal

Visit Coll's website and her blog, and read an excerpt from Acceptance.

The Page 69 Test: Acceptance.

--Marshal Zeringue

Geraldine Brooks: 5 most important books

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks talked to Newsweek earlier this year about her five most important books.

Learn more about that select list.

She also tagged a couple of titles using other criteria:

A classic that, on rereading, was disappointing:

Little Women, not because it isn't wonderful. But reading it after learning about the rich and radical mind of Louisa May Alcott made me yearn for the novel she might have written without the fetters of convention.

The book you wanted to share with your child:

Several summers ago, my son and I would sit in the swing on the back porch every morning reading The Lord of the Rings aloud. I wanted him to create his own vision before the movie came out. As we got deeper into the book, the sessions would get longer and longer and I'd realize half my day was shot. But it was worth it.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Candy from Strangers," the movie

"If Candy from Strangers were made into a movie, the key casting decision would be who to put in the role of jazz bass-playing private eye August Riordan," writes author Mark Coggins in the current feature at "My Book, The Movie":

[L]et’s review the requirements for the character. Riordan narrates most of the novels himself, so the reader only gets a few hints about his physical appearance. However, Vulture Capital is told in an objective third person point of view, and there is a description of him in the scene where he meets venture capitalist Ted Valmont:

He was over six feet tall, but his heavy musculature made him appear shorter — especially in contrast to Ted Valmont’s willowy stature. His forehead and jaw were square and his mouth was a crooked line that seemed fixed in a sardonic grin. A crookeder scar traced a route from the corner of his mouth to the edge of his jaw. He had brown eyes and tousled brown hair that he had not invested over $10 to have cut. His suit — with puckered seams and lapels that would not lay flat — was poorly made and its fit on his heavy frame was bad. His nose had been broken at least once.

As far as personality goes, he is pretty much of a wiseacre, although he is more of a counter-puncher: while quick with a comeback line, he doesn’t go out of his way to antagonize people upon first meeting — at least in the later books. And in the intelligence department, he’s not dumb, but he’s not a genius either.

So who would you cast for the role? See who Coggins -- and some Hollywood-types -- came up with.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Hailey Lind's "Shooting Gallery"

Today's feature at the Page 69 Test: Hailey Lind's Shooting Gallery.

About the book, from the publisher:

San Francisco's art world is exhibiting murderous tendencies...

Modernism isn't Annie's thing, but even she is surprised to discover that the "sculpture" in a prestigious gallery's grisly new exhibition is an all-too-real corpse — the artist's. Meanwhile, a Chagall painting is stolen from the Brock Museum, and Annie's old friend Bryan is accused of being in on the fix. To track down the missing Chagall, she'll need the dubious assistance of a certain sexy art thief. And if Michael — or whatever his real name may be — isn't distraction enough, Annie's mother shows up in town, acting strangely. Annie's got to solve these mysteries, and fast — because art is long, but life can be very, very short.

Read reviews of the Art Lover’s Mystery Series and visit Hailey Lind's website and blog.

Feint of Art is an Agatha Award nominee for best first novel.

Brush with Death, the third volume in the Art Lover's Mystery Series, is due out in July.

The Page 69 Test: Shooting Gallery.

--Marshal Zeringue

A top 10 list of short books

I've not read any of Dan Rhodes's books but I think I might like to. He's crafted a top 10 list short books for the Guardian -- read more about the list here -- with a reasonable preface:

"I was reading a new novel the other day when it struck me that the author might as well be a murderer. It wasn't a bad novel, it was just too long. Passages that could and should have been lopped out had been left in, but I felt I had to plough through them in case they had any bearing on the story. It might have been a really good read if the author had had the gumption, or the balls, to shave off a hundred pages. And here's where the murder comes in. Say it takes the average reader an extra two hours (two hours they will never get back) to read all the filler. And what if the book does well and finds 250,000 readers? By my calculations this author will have wasted a total of 57 waking years - the equivalent of a long human life. And what if this monster continues to publish such books? Surely that would make them a serial killer? I was about to dial 999 when I realised that maybe, just maybe, I was getting a little overexcited.

But it seems obvious (doesn't it?) that writing overlong books is at the very least plain bad manners. I can't understand why writers are so often pilloried for writing short books. Brevity is mistaken for laziness when more often than not it's the opposite that is true. My new book, Gold, clocks in at 198 pages, and I'm convinced that, apart from in truly exceptional cases, this is about as long as a book ought to be. Of course I fully expect to eat my words next time I read a run of 400 page marvels, but in the meantime here's a list of works of fiction that I love which, in the edition on my shelf, don't run a page over the 200 mark. All killer, no filler."

All fair enough, and I agree with much of it -- but why be so categorical about these things? I like short books and I've also read many books that should be trimmed, yet some of the very best books are well over 200 pages.

Rhodes's argument for brevity is partly an argument for quality, so his case is not as questionable as someone I once knew who liked big books largely without regard to the quality of the writing or the story -- Michener, Tolstoy, whatever ... it was all the same to her.

But still.

One illustration of a weakness of Rhodes's argument: the tenth slot on his list goes to Gabriel García Márquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Not a bad book at all, and I might even recommend it before the more famous One Hundred Years of Solitude if I was not sure the reader would stick with the story to the end or if I was trying to seduce her to the charms of Latin American fiction. But if I were really trying to develop her into a fan of García Márquez's writing, I'd put Love in the Time of Cholera in her hands, all 368 brilliant pages of it.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Daniel Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe"

The Harvard scholar Michael Shinagel, editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Robinson Crusoe (revised 1993), applied the "Page 99 Test" to Daniel Defoe's classic novel.

Part of Shinagel's findings:

If we turn to page ninety-nine in the Norton Critical Edition (second edition), we learn how Crusoe painstakingly makes an "Umbrella" for himself as protection against "the Rains" and "the Heats" on his island. His self-sufficiency prompts him to reflect:

Thus I liv'd mighty comfortably,
my Mind being resigning to the Will of God
and throwing my self wholly upon the Disposal of his Providence.
This made my life better than sociable....

Does this passage validate Ford Madox Ford's claim -- "Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you." -- and what else can we learn about the novel from it?

See: The Page 99 Test: Robinson Crusoe.

--Marshal Zeringue

R.N. Morris at "The Rap Sheet"

"The Rap Sheet" has started what I hope will be a long tradition of hosting authors as guest bloggers. James Ellroy and Megan Abbott led the way; now occupying the seat of honor:

British author Roger Morris, or “R.N. Morris,” as his byline appears on A Gentle Axe, his new novel, set in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1866 and starring none other than detective Porfiry Petrovich from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s classic novel Crime and Punishment.

Today's post from Morris, "I Have Always Been a Victim of My Ideas," opens:

I went through a phase of my life where almost everywhere I went, or everything that happened to me, provoked an idea for a book.

Actually, thinking about it, I don’t believe this was a phase at all. It’s just the way I am, all the time. It’s probably an illness, and can certainly be an inconvenience. You end up with a lot of ideas and not enough time to work on any of them. Then there are the books you dream. Those are the best. But, oh, the sadness upon waking, when you realize that the masterpiece you thought you had written, the book that is the perfect literary expression of your soul, not only doesn’t exist, but never will. You try to hang on to the essence of the book your subconscious mind presented you with, you may even be tempted to go looking for it in that box where you keep all of your discarded dreams (otherwise known as rejected manuscripts), but any attempt to re-create it is bound to result in the bitterest disappointment.

Do read on.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Hajdu: 5 most important books

David Hadju, critic and author of Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn and Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina, recently named his five most important books for Newsweek.

He also tagged a couple of titles in other categories:

An Important Book that you admit you haven't read:
I read lots of classic novels, but what I'm more bothered by is my inability to keep up with great stuff that's being written now. I'd love to get around to reading What Is the What by Dave Eggers. Everyone says it's great.

A classic that, on rereading, was disappointing:
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. It's great, but I haven't been able to get through it again. I'm sure it's not his fault, it's mine. I suppose I'd like it more if I learned Spanish, but working with English is hard enough as it is.

Learn more about Hadju's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Diane Shipley reading?

British book blogger Diane Shipley shared her recent reading list over at Writers Read.

Part of her report:

I was recently unfortunate enough to spend six weeks without the internet (which is when I discovered that four days offline is my limit) and with very patchy TV reception, so I read twenty-four books. My favourites included About Alice, Calvin Trillin's poignant and understated tribute to his late wife and muse, and Kalisha Buckhanon's Upstate, a modern day Romeo and Juliet told in the form of letters between two teenage lovers, one of whom is in jail… yes, upstate. It's fantastic.

There's more: read on.

Learn more about Shipley at www.dianeshipley.com and the books site Trashionista.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Freeman's literary dream

John Freeman, president of the National Book Critics Circle, writes in the Denver Post:

One of my recurring dreams involves selling all my possessions, shutting down my cellphone and e-mail, and setting off around the country - and then the world - by train with a small suitcase full of great books. If I ever do this, I'd take things I had already read. And if I had to narrow this group to a list of 25, here is what they would be. I'm not sure they would all fit in one suitcase, but they'd certainly be worth packing two.

Number Two on his list:

The Wind Up Bird Chronicle | Haruki Murakami. (1997).

An unemployed man loses his cat and sets off on an odyssey that takes him across the past half-century of Japanese history in this hilarious, grotesque and essential novel.

Find out about the book that beat Murakami.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Death in West Wheeling," the movie

A description of Michael Allen Dymmoch's Death in West Wheeling:

When a teacher disappears from a local missionary school in the rural town of West Wheeling, acting sheriff Homer Deters investigates. Before long, he's got three more missing persons: local ne'er-do-well Ash Jackson, a pregnant teenager, and an ATF agent on Jackson's trail. Further investigation turns up the bones of a murder victim in Goode Swamp and a second corpse dumped by the highway. Homer must determine just whose remains these are, and who — if any — among the missing might be their killer. The investigation is complicated by a car theft, a twenty-three vehicle pileup in the center of town, a missing pet tiger, and the arrival of more ATF agents in search of their vanished colleague. With no help from the feds, Homer turns to his moonshiner buddy, Rye Willis, and the town's eccentric postmistress, Nina Ross. Their aid and his own nose for the truth enable Homer to locate the missing, identify the bodies, and bring a murderous impostor to justice.

Who should play these characters in a film adaptation of the novel? See who the author has in mind.

--Marshal Zeringue

Happiness economics

Darrin McMahon, author of Happiness: A History, has an interesting post up at the "Open University" academic group blog.

Who's tired of GNP? A lot of people, it seems. Open University readers may have heard about the new vogue of happiness economics, a discipline that draws on the insights of psychology to render the traditionally dismal science less dismal. Essentially, the idea is this: Survey data in the United States and elsewhere seems to suggest that people have not gotten much happier over the last several decades, at least as measured by their own periodic responses to questions like, "On the whole, would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not so happy." And this despite massive gains in GNP during the same period. So if greater wealth appears not to translate into greater happiness, why should policy makers work so hard to grow GNP? Surely, these economists reason, it makes more sense to shift priorities to boosting other forms of well-being, like happiness itself. Indeed, the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, admittedly one of the world's poorest countries and so not with a lot of cash to spare, has taken to promoting Gross National Happiness (GNH) in place of GNP.

I confess that I'm something of a happiness skeptic on this issue, although that may just mean I'm sad.... [Read on]

See the Page 69 Test entry for Darrin McMahon, Happiness: A History.

Two other recent books in the Page 69 Test series also address issues raised by happiness economics. See:

Diane Coyle, The Soulful Science
Gregg Easterbrook, The Progress Paradox

--Marshal Zeringue