What is Malcolm Gladwell reading?

In conjunction with the publication of its Fall Books issue, the New Yorker asked a few of its regular contributors what they were reading.

Among the respondents--Malcolm Gladwell:

I’ve just read Michael Lewis’s The Blind Side, which I think is my favorite Lewis book ever (and I’ve loved them all). I’ve just started Michael Tolkin’s The Return of the Player, because I ran into Tolkin at a party and he seemed really, really funny—and the book does not disappoint. It’s hard to go wrong with a book that has, as one of its characters, a man with seven hundred and fifty million dollars who is desperate to become a billionaire. Next up is the new Don Winslow thriller, The Winter of Frankie Machine. I’m an avid thriller-reader and have recently become hooked on Winslow, the way I got hooked on Lee Child a few years ago. I’m also working my way through the great love of my life, which is the British magazine Car, which (The New Yorker excepted) I think might be the best magazine in the world. Imagine a car magazine, photographed and laid out as beautifully as Vogue, that reads as though it was written entirely by overeducated, slightly snotty, and hilarious Englishmen in their twenties. What’s not to like?

Malcolm Gladwell has been a staff writer with the New Yorker magazine since 1996. His 1999 profile of Ron Popeil won a National Magazine Award, and in 2005 he was named one of TIME magazine's 100 Most Influential People. He is the author of two books, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference, (2000) and Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005), both of which were number one New York Times bestsellers.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: "Darwin Loves You"

George Levine, Professor Emeritus of English at Rutgers University, has just published a new book--Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Re-enchantment of the World.

I asked George to apply the "page 69 test" to his book. Here is his reply:

Well, if you're a Darwinian, you believe that everything is connected to everything else, and as a Darwinian I agree that p. 69 connects (as, I expect, McLuhan knew that almost any page of any book would connect) to its major arguments, preoccupations, tendencies, and ambitions. Here as throughout, I try to represent Darwin as many-sided, but to emphasize an aspect of his life and writings that the usual focus on his big theory tends to ignore: Darwin loved the natural world. My book insists that you can be a Darwinian and love it too. Whatever bleak inferences people persist in making about a world governed not by God but by natural law, for Darwin the world was a miracle, a joy, and it gave him the kinds of satisfactions that many -- perhaps most -- people think can only be derived from religion. Taking Darwin as a model, p. 69 furthers the book's argument for the possibility of what the political philosophers Jane Bennett and William Connolly call "nontheistic enchantment."

So the hard-nosed Darwin represented on p. 69 is also the Darwin who is "a celebrant of the natural world,...awed and enchanted by the complexity, intelligence, and variety of the lower animals." While Darwin's theories have been used for a lot of things that many will agree are worse than bad, positively terrible -- eugenics, in particular, but also the strongest kind of dog-eat-dog capitalism, there are other and better possible uses of his theory. Virtually everyone has used Darwin to justify positions that he almost certainly wouldn't have endorsed, as he wouldn't have endorsed the eugenics that his cousin, Galton, initiated. Nor would he, in all likelihood, have endorsed Kropotkin's anarchism, which Kropotkin proposed with Darwinian sanction in his book, Mutual Aid. While Darwin was not an "innocent" (and p. 69 emphasizes his unselfconscious acceptance of many of his culture's prejudices), his work can and should be taken as liberating, inspiring, and "enchanting."

I point out on p. 69 that, after clearing away the debris of Darwin's negative reputation, the second half of the book will be devoted to locating in Darwin's own work a model for nontheistic enchantment. And this I try to do by looking closely at the language he actually used to create and argue his brilliant (and sometimes frightening theory), and at some of his personal experiences, most particularly and sadly, the death of his beloved ten year old daughter. Paying attention to the romantic Darwin, one can break free from the assumption that value only inheres in a world understood religiously. The spiritual emptiness and disenchantment that Max Weber saw in the modern scientifically oriented world is not there in Darwin's. Darwin, I argue, loves the world, and we might well learn from him even more than the theory of evolution by natural selection. We might learn to love the world, and for its own sake.

Many thanks to George for the report on Darwin Love You and its page 69.

Adam Gopnik praised the book in the New Yorker:

Darwin Loves You ... tries to vindicate Darwin for students of literature by emphasizing his modest “sense of wonder,” the almost mystical awe at the sheer existence of life in the universe; Darwin disenchanted believers in Heaven, but he reënchanted lovers of Earth. Levine’s book is one of the most appealing and subtle attempts to bridge biology and the humanities. It proposes an “enchanted secularity”; because Darwin robs mankind of place and purpose, he gave us a chance to love and revere nature “precisely in its refusal to be like us.”

For more endorsements, click here and here.

Click here to read Chapter One of Darwin Loves You.

Among Levine's other books are: Dying to Know (Chicago, 2002); The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot (Cambridge, 2001); Darwin and the Novelists (Harvard, 1988); The Realistic Imagination (Chicago, 1981); Lifebirds (Rutgers, 1997). He also wrote introduction and notes for The Origin of the Species (Barnes and Noble, 2004).

Previous "page 69 tests":
John Barlow, Intoxicated
Alicia Steimberg, The Rainforest
Alan Wolfe, Does American Democracy Still Work?
John Dickerson, On Her Trail
Marcus Sakey, The Blade Itself
Randy Boyagoda, Governor of the Northern Province
John Gittings, The Changing Face of China
Rachel Kadish, Tolstoy Lied
Eric Rauchway, Blessed Among Nations
Tim Brookes, Guitar and other books
Ruth Padel, Tigers in Red Weather
William Haywood Henderson, Augusta Locke
Jed Horne, Breach of Faith
Robert Greer, The Fourth Perspective
David Plotz, The Genius Factory
Michael Allen Dymmoch, White Tiger
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy
Tom Lutz, Doing Nothing
Libby Fischer Hellmann, A Shot To Die For
Nelson Algren, The Man With the Golden Arm
Bob Harris, Prisoner of Trebekistan
Elaine Flinn, Deadly Collection
Louise Welsh, The Bullet Trick
Gregg Hurwitz, Last Shot
Martha Powers, Death Angel
N.M. Kelby, Whale Season
Mario Acevedo, The Nymphos of Rocky Flats
Dominic Smith, The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre
Simon Blackburn, Lust
Linda L. Richards, Calculated Loss
Kevin Guilfoile, Cast of Shadows
Ronlyn Domingue, The Mercy of Thin Air
Shari Caudron, Who Are You People?
Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics
John Sutherland, How to Read a Novel
Steven Miles, Oath Betrayed
Alan Brown, Audrey Hepburn's Neck
Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale

--Marshal Zeringue

Politicians and the porn they write

Last week Slate ran a interesting quiz asking readers to match cringe-worthy sex scenes with the politician-novelists who wrote them.

Barbara Boxer, Jimmy Carter, Lynne Cheney, Newt Gingrich, and Kenneth Starr are among the authors who have their handicraft spotlighted.

Among the novel passages quoted:

"She romped on top of Simolzak's huge frame, straddling him with her hands on his chest, her back arched and her breasts flailing wildly in the air. Her back was to him and her long hair swung from side to side as if accentuating the abandonment of her screams."

"I set the edge of my teeth halfway up her breast, just at the point of tension but not, so far as I could tell, of pain. This was the sweetest flesh I had ever tasted, including fish and fowl."

Click here to take the quiz.

--Marshal Zeringue

Halloween books

"If any holiday seems perfectly paired to crime fiction, it’s Halloween," Jeff Pierce points out over at The Rap Sheet. "You don’t see bloody knives used as decorations at Christmas, or gravestones punctuating front yards at Easter."

He offers some reading suggestions and a few helpful links:

Just consider, for instance, Agatha Christie’s Halloween Party (a Hercule Poirot mystery), or Charles Williams’ All Hallow’s Eve, or David Robbins’ Spook Night. How about Lilian Jackson Braun’s The Cat Who ... Talked to Ghosts, or Ed McBain’s Tricks (an 87th Precinct Mystery), or Susan Wittig Albert’s Witches Bane?

If you’re in the market for an enchanting mystery to match the mood of this centuries-old holiday, you need look no further than these three lists--from MyShelf.com, the Springfield (Massachusetts) City Library, and Suite 101.

Are you more interested in witchcraft and wizardry than in crime fiction? Take the Guardian's quiz. (My score: 4 out of 10...and only lucky guesses saved me on three of those.)

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: "Intoxicated"

John Barlow's novel Intoxicated "is a booze-swilling, cocaine-soaked novel of excess and madness in rural Yorkshire, set amid the great commercial developments of the late nineteenth century. It’s a novel about drinking, about invention and re-invention, about home, language... and soft drinks."

Having learned that much about the novel, of course I had to ask John to apply the "page 69 test" to his book. Here is what he reported:

Page sixty-nine of Intoxicated is the first page of chapter four. The previous chapters have seen humpback midgets thrown from speeding steam trains, wine-dribbling drunks in the gutter, a little Sherry-fuelled romance in a back street, a game of football played with someone’s head, and a temporary visit to non-alcoholic Heaven (or Hell).

After all that, the fourth chapter introduces us to the real heart of the story, in the person of George Brookes, a shy, dyslexic sixteen year-old boy. As the chapter opens he stands alone in the garden at Moorlands, the old family home. Without knowing it he also stands on the verge of a great whoosh of events that will propel him and his family towards greatness and tragedy.

Intoxicated takes the Victorian novel form and attempts to inject a touch of fun and magic. It describes the emergence of consumer brands towards the end of the nineteenth century, a time when ‘modern’ consumerism and marketing really took off. It is also a story of the kind of people who rose to prominence in that amazing period in history, when the old values of the early industrial revolution gave way to the brash, aggressive world of the brands we know today: Moxie, Dr Pepper’s and Coca-Cola were all launched at around this time, and Intoxicated spoofs the emergence of the soft drinks business with its own soda pop - Rhubarilla.

Is page sixty-nine representative of the whole novel? Well, I guess not, because the tone here is calm and reflective, with straightforward description occupying most of the page (it’s only half a page, actually, because it’s the first page of a chapter). Elsewhere in the book there is more drama, drunkenness and a good bit of slapstick. Incidentally, I stole the description of the garden from the novel John Halifax, Gentleman (1857) by Dinah Craik, a popular 19th century novelist. I intended to plagiarize the passage word for word - after all, Mrs Craik is long dead and well out of copyright. Her text, though, was very dense, and it got trimmed and re-set and mangled until even the lady herself would no longer recognize it. Nevertheless, thank you, Dinah.

Finally, I would be interesting to see a film of the book, because towards the end is a scene set in a nineteenth century musical hall (vaudeville), including what might be the world’s very first ‘reverse striptease’. That would be worth seeing.

Many thanks to John for the input.

Intoxicated is out in paperback February ’07 in the US, and will also be published in German, Italian, Russian and Polish.

Click here to read one excerpt from Intoxicated and here to read another.

The New York Times and the Washington Post reviewed the novel: click here to read these reviews and others.

Curious about what John is reading and reviewing? Click here.

He also hosts an interesting open blog. Here is his take on Dana Spiotta's Eat the Document, a novel I admire as well (and which reminded both of us of the movie Running On Empty.)

John Barlow is also the author of Eating Mammals--"Three novellas which are all in some strange way about mammals. And they are all based on fact."

Click here to read an excerpt from Eating Mammals, and here for some reviews.

Previous "page 69 tests":
Alicia Steimberg, The Rainforest
Alan Wolfe, Does American Democracy Still Work?
John Dickerson, On Her Trail
Marcus Sakey, The Blade Itself
Randy Boyagoda, Governor of the Northern Province
John Gittings, The Changing Face of China
Rachel Kadish, Tolstoy Lied
Eric Rauchway, Blessed Among Nations
Tim Brookes, Guitar and other books
Ruth Padel, Tigers in Red Weather
William Haywood Henderson, Augusta Locke
Jed Horne, Breach of Faith
Robert Greer, The Fourth Perspective
David Plotz, The Genius Factory
Michael Allen Dymmoch, White Tiger
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy
Tom Lutz, Doing Nothing
Libby Fischer Hellmann, A Shot To Die For
Nelson Algren, The Man With the Golden Arm
Bob Harris, Prisoner of Trebekistan
Elaine Flinn, Deadly Collection
Louise Welsh, The Bullet Trick
Gregg Hurwitz, Last Shot
Martha Powers, Death Angel
N.M. Kelby, Whale Season
Mario Acevedo, The Nymphos of Rocky Flats
Dominic Smith, The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre
Simon Blackburn, Lust
Linda L. Richards, Calculated Loss
Kevin Guilfoile, Cast of Shadows
Ronlyn Domingue, The Mercy of Thin Air
Shari Caudron, Who Are You People?
Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics
John Sutherland, How to Read a Novel
Steven Miles, Oath Betrayed
Alan Brown, Audrey Hepburn's Neck
Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 1,000 lists

From the Christian Science Monitor:

Lovers of both books and lists will enjoy the "Top 1,000" lists assembled by the Online Computer Library Center. The site provides lists of the top 1,000 holdings of member libraries across the United States, offering a unique perspective on what constitutes "culture" today in the US. (Musical recordings - mostly classical and opera - are included.) There's a general list and then categories like the Top 1,000 travel books ("Travels of Marco Polo," No.2), the Top 1,000 poetry volumes ("Mother Goose," No.1), and the Top 1,000 banned books (the Bible, No. 1.) Bibliophiles will relish noting the creation of new classics ("The DaVinci Code," No. 469; "Dilbert," No. 399.) It's also interesting to see how great books stack up against one another ("Gulliver's Travels," No. 20 versus "Moby Dick," No. 34) or to see writers compete with siblings ("Wuthering Heights" by Emily Brontë, No. 28, versus. "Jane Eyre" by sister Charlotte, No. 30) And don't miss the nifty mix of factoids connected to the main list.

For a list of the best books about listing, click here.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: "The Rainforest"

I first learned about Alicia Steimberg's The Rainforest from Kim's review at Reading Matters. Kim's bottom line: "Excellent; highly recommended."

A synopsis of the novel, from the publisher:

For middle-aged Cecilia, the rainforest represents both solace and tenuously controlled danger, as she discovers when she follows the same path each day from her hotel at a Brazilian spa into the surrounding jungle. Although her daily forays are designed to help leave her painful past behind, Cecilia’s thoughts return to her deceased husband, her drug-addicted son, and her own place in the world. These thoughts are her only company until the present intrudes once more in the unlikely form of a fellow patient at the spa, a North American man who might represent a second chance.

In The Rainforest, the award-winning novelist Alicia Steimberg offers the reader new definitions of happiness and mature love—or perhaps simply the reassurance that in life, nothing is ever quite as terrible as one fears or quite as glorious as one remembers.

I contacted Alicia at home in Argentina and asked her to apply the "page 69 test" to her book. Here is what she reported:

It is perfectly representative of the book. I'm sure there is a word in English to say it is the page that condenses and puts an end to the first act of this terrible drama, because that is what The Rainforest is, the terrible drama of a mother and her son when they both undergo the effects of drug addiction on the boy. Once a friend, also a writer, asked me what had "really happened in real life" as compared to the story told in the book, and when I enumerated what had really happened and what didn’t, we both laughed. Everything that was negative, even tormenting and awful in the book had happened in reality. Everything that was reassuring and nice had been invented. I'll say more: I can't say I like going back into this, even though in my "real life," also in my son's, things are much better now: my real son has miraculously recovered, after many years of suffering and anguish: he’s the father of two marvelous kids, Ezequiel, 12, and Iván, 8, who are a joy to love and watch while they are growing up; and we have become "just a happy family.” I'm the sort of writer who seldom drifts apart from her own experience, but The Rainforest, unlike any other of my books, portrays what I consider the worst part of my life, worse than my father's untimely death when I was eight and my brother was four, worse than being left with my harsh, mentally deranged mother until I was able to disentangle myself from her and start feeling free, relatively free, of course, in the world of the educated porteño middle-middle class. Funny: I'm much happier now, at 73, than I was at the time I wrote The Rainforest.

Many thanks to Alicia for the feedback.

To read an excerpt from The Rainforest, click here. Click here and here to read more praise for the novel.

Critics also praised Alicia's previous novel, Call Me Magdalena:

"Steimberg's simple and evocative prose distinguishes this 1992 Planeta Prize-winning novel about the quest of a young Argentine woman to understand her history and her heritage. The granddaughter of Russian Jews who emigrated to Argentina, and the daughter of parents indifferent to Judaism who embrace Argentine society, she is in a kind of cultural limbo, caught between one world she cannot forget and another she wants to embrace."--Publishers Weekly.

"All sorts of genres are imperturbably parodied in this witty, prizewinning 1992 novel from the Argentinean author of Musicians and Watchmakers. . . . Intricate, sensuous, and frequently hilarious: very much like a really good Luis Buñuel film. Steimberg is one of Latin America's best writers."--Kirkus Reviews.

The translator for these and other works is Andrea G. Labinger, a professor of Spanish and honors director at the University of La Verne in Claremont, California. Andrea not only helped me put together this item but also agreed to share the translator's take on "the page 69" test. I'll run her response later this week; watch this space.

Previous "page 69 tests":
Alan Wolfe, Does American Democracy Still Work?
John Dickerson, On Her Trail
Marcus Sakey, The Blade Itself
Randy Boyagoda, Governor of the Northern Province
John Gittings, The Changing Face of China
Rachel Kadish, Tolstoy Lied
Eric Rauchway, Blessed Among Nations
Tim Brookes, Guitar and other books
Ruth Padel, Tigers in Red Weather
William Haywood Henderson, Augusta Locke
Jed Horne, Breach of Faith
Robert Greer, The Fourth Perspective
David Plotz, The Genius Factory
Michael Allen Dymmoch, White Tiger
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy
Tom Lutz, Doing Nothing
Libby Fischer Hellmann, A Shot To Die For
Nelson Algren, The Man With the Golden Arm
Bob Harris, Prisoner of Trebekistan
Elaine Flinn, Deadly Collection
Louise Welsh, The Bullet Trick
Gregg Hurwitz, Last Shot
Martha Powers, Death Angel
N.M. Kelby, Whale Season
Mario Acevedo, The Nymphos of Rocky Flats
Dominic Smith, The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre
Simon Blackburn, Lust
Linda L. Richards, Calculated Loss
Kevin Guilfoile, Cast of Shadows
Ronlyn Domingue, The Mercy of Thin Air
Shari Caudron, Who Are You People?
Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics
John Sutherland, How to Read a Novel
Steven Miles, Oath Betrayed
Alan Brown, Audrey Hepburn's Neck
Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice"

In bookstores on November 1: The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice: First Journals and Poems 1937-1952 by Allen Ginsberg, Bill Morgan (Editor), Juanita Lieberman-Plimpton (Editor).

From the publisher:

Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) kept journals his entire life, beginning at the age of eleven. These first journals detail the inner thoughts of the awkward boy from Paterson, New Jersey, who would become the major poet and spokesperson of the literary phenomenon called the Beat Generation. The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice covers the most important and formative years of Ginsberg's storied life. It was during these years that he met Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, both of whom would become lifelong friends and significant literary figures. Ginsberg's journals--so candid he insisted they be published only after his death--also document his relationships with such notable figures of Beat lore as Carl Solomon, Lucien Carr, and Herbert Huncke. Conversations with Kerouac, his beloved muse Neal Cassady, and others have been transcribed from Ginsberg's memory, and information will be found here relating to the famous murder of David Kammerer by Carr--a startlingly violent chapter in Beat prehistory--which has been credited in New York magazine as "giving birth to the Beat Generation." It was also during this period that he began to recognize his homosexuality, and to think of himself as a poet. Illustrated with photos from Ginsberg's private archive and enhanced by an appendix of over 100 of Ginsberg's earliest poems, The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice is a major literary event.

From Publishers Weekly:

Starred Review. The troubled and excitable mind of the young Beat poet is given free rein in this exhaustive and often illuminating collection of his early private writing. The text serves as an evolving portrait of both a writer and a man: from the first, self-conscious high school entries to the stylistically mature entries of the early '50s, the degree of insight and the fluidity of prose multiplies exponentially. Throughout, Ginsberg lives up to his reputation as the most intellectually rigorous as well as the most neurotic of the Columbia gang that included Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. Luckily, his neuroses—mostly of a sexual/ romantic nature—are often expressed with lucidity and intensity. Ginsberg's obsessive relationship with the charismatic Neal Cassady is discussed at particular length, often in a narrative, slightly fictionalized form that provides a fascinating, and significantly more interior, counterpoint to Kerouac's On the Road. An appendix of early poems provides significant insight into Ginsberg's developing aesthetic. As a whole, the poems are entertaining in their own right, but, like most of the journals, they can best be appreciated in reference to Ginsberg's body of later writing.

Previously here on the blog: "Howl" ... fifty years later

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: "Does American Democracy Still Work?"

Alan Wolfe is professor of political science and director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. His most recent book is Does American Democracy Still Work?

I asked him to apply the "page 69 test" to his book. Here is what he reported:

Prompted by my colleagues at The New Republic, I rose to the challenge and looked at what I had written on p. 69 of my recent book, Does American Democracy Still Work? Hey, I liked what I found there -- no surprise, I guess, since I wrote it. The sixty-ninth page of my book lands the reader smack dab in a discussion of accountability, and at the present moment -- just days before an accountability election -- the subject could not be more important. So great is the gap between people and their political system, I argue, that we have lost even the most minimal conceptions of holding America's leaders accountable for their actions. Indeed, non-accountability seems to be contagious: the president does not fire his Defense Secretary, college football teams fight and are barely punished, and even America's most famous recent felon, Ken Lay, died and had his guilty plea overturned. So what will Americans do in 2006? I hope they decide to prove me wrong in what I wrote on p. 69 and hold the party in power accountable for what it has done.

Thanks to Alan for the input.

Click here to read Chapter One from Does American Democracy Still Work? Click here for the table of contents and here to peruse the index.

To read only a few of the many excellent reviews Does American Democracy Still Work? has received, click here.

Matthew Dallek reviewed the book for the Washington Post:

Wolfe's thesis that our civic life has been degraded by cultural warriors armed with populist bazookas is provocative and fresh. By weaving together the findings of political scientists with journalistic observations about the Iraq War and other developments, he shows that the franchise is not the only gauge of democracy's performance and captures the ways in which conservative Republicans have fostered an opaque, unjust, unrepresentative political system in recent years.... In the end, Wolfe's argument that a toxic brew of right-wing populism and moralistic politics has riven the nation and made it more difficult for American leaders to address public problems is convincing.

To listen to a conversation with Alan Wolfe on where we're headed, as a democracy, and what to do about it, click here.

Last month Alan asked:

Did it finally happen here? I've always been a skeptic of Sinclair Lewis's sloppily written novel of 1935--and equally skeptical of all those left-wingers who predict, sometimes with barely repressed glee, a fascist takeover of the United States. But there is no doubting that something finally happened this week. It is not just that Congress is about to give the president the authority to collect anyone, including an American citizen, off the street to be indefinitely imprisoned as an enemy combatant.... [read more here]

Recently, Wolfe asked (and answered): "Should We Shut Up About Diversity?"

"Tempting Faith is the story of how David Kuo, an unassuming if ambitious young man, discovered the wonder-filled joy flowing from devotion to a force more powerful than himself," opens Wolfe's most recent book review. "I don't mean that he found God, ... the object of his reverence lived not in Nazareth, but in Austin."

Previous "page 69 tests":
John Dickerson, On Her Trail
Marcus Sakey, The Blade Itself
Randy Boyagoda, Governor of the Northern Province
John Gittings, The Changing Face of China
Rachel Kadish, Tolstoy Lied
Eric Rauchway, Blessed Among Nations
Tim Brookes, Guitar and other books
Ruth Padel, Tigers in Red Weather
William Haywood Henderson, Augusta Locke
Jed Horne, Breach of Faith
Robert Greer, The Fourth Perspective
David Plotz, The Genius Factory
Michael Allen Dymmoch, White Tiger
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy
Tom Lutz, Doing Nothing
Libby Fischer Hellmann, A Shot To Die For
Nelson Algren, The Man With the Golden Arm
Bob Harris, Prisoner of Trebekistan
Elaine Flinn, Deadly Collection
Louise Welsh, The Bullet Trick
Gregg Hurwitz, Last Shot
Martha Powers, Death Angel
N.M. Kelby, Whale Season
Mario Acevedo, The Nymphos of Rocky Flats
Dominic Smith, The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre
Simon Blackburn, Lust
Linda L. Richards, Calculated Loss
Kevin Guilfoile, Cast of Shadows
Ronlyn Domingue, The Mercy of Thin Air
Shari Caudron, Who Are You People?
Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics
John Sutherland, How to Read a Novel
Steven Miles, Oath Betrayed
Alan Brown, Audrey Hepburn's Neck
Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale

--Marshal Zeringue

A literary guide to Vancouver

Jeff MacIntyre, author of Salon's literary guide to his native Vancouver, writes:

Vancouver's literature is suffused with the year-round damp and mild climate, for which the region is dubbed the Rain Coast. (Indeed, according to Margaret Atwood, Canada's literary den mother, all Canadian literature is foremost a product of the nation's physical environment.) Coupland, whose City of Glass (2001) is the contemporary Vancouver's unofficial travel guide cum decoder ring, describes the exit from the city: "I want you to imagine you are driving north, across the Lions Gate Bridge, and the sky is steely grey and the sugar-dusted mountains loom blackly in the distance. Imagine what lies behind those mountain -- realize that there are only more mountains -- mountains until the North pole, mountains until the end of the world, mountains taller than a thousand me's, mountains taller than a thousand you's." Here in a soaked-through rain-forest vision of New England, Henry Thoreau would have succumbed to cabin fever.
....
In his most recent work, JPod (2006), Coupland mines an inviting setting for generational anomie in the world of a fictional game company, noticeably modeled after Vancouver-born Electronic Arts. (A previous novel, Microserfs [2003], is a cruise down I-5 to the Redmond, Wash., campus of Microsoft.) But it is City of Glass that serves as the best street guide to Vancouver's curiously poly-ethnic parochialism: of everything from the city's straight-outta-Harajuku teen tourists to its post-and-beam residential architectural glories. Artist and polymath, perhaps even "his generation's most interesting curator," Coupland looks to continue moving deftly in other artistic mediums, such as these sculptures of his own, personally chewed first editions.

Other writers who rate inclusion in MacIntyre's literary Vancouver include William Gibson, Alice Munro, Malcolm Lowry, and John Vaillant. Click here to read the complete article.

Another Vancouver-born writer: novelist and founder of January Magazine, Linda L. Richards.

Other items in Salon's literary guide series include:
A literary guide to Baltimore
A literary guide to Argentina
A literary guide to Afghanistan
A literary guide to Louisiana
A literary guide to Australia
A literary guide to Norway
A literary guide to Turkey
A literary guide to Japan
A literary guide to Martha's Vineyard
A literary guide to West Texas
A literary guide to Togo
A literary guide to Brooklyn
A literary guide to Miami

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: "On Her Trail"

I am an avid follower of John Dickerson's political journalism which used to appear in TIME magazine and is now featured at Slate.

His new book is On Her Trail, the story of his mother, Nancy Dickerson, the first woman to break into the all-male business of TV news. If you are like me when I first heard about the book, you may think this is a certain kind of book--an admiring, probably uncritical, portrait. You would be wrong.

I asked John to apply the "page 69 test" to his book. Here is what he reported:

If you open to page 69 of On Her Trail you find yourself at the start of Chapter Nine. It’s helpful for my purposes that you’ve come to this page because this book about my mother Nancy Dickerson is more than just the story of her life in journalism. It is the story of how her son, with whom she had an occasionally rocky relationship, discovered her after she died. If you pay attention only to the lovely pictures on the cover and on the inside you’re likely to think this is just one long glowing portrait of a mother from an adoring son. It’s more complicated and hopefully interesting than that.

On page 69 I’m in the Wisconsin countryside visiting my aunt Mary Ellen Philipp on an old dairy farm where she vacations. My cousins are these wonderful people with whom I had fallen out of touch. After Mom’s death and the death of their father we spent more time together. Though the Dickerson family had grown up in a more rarified atmosphere, my brother and I blended in with their world pretty quickly: “Whether it was in Milwaukee or Washington, the grandchildren of Fred and Florence Hanschman were familiar with cocktail hour, or as other people call it, lunch.”

The real discoveries from this trip were found under the stairs of the farm’s granary where I found a packet of my mother’s letters, old newspaper clippings and photographs. My mother had been famous before I was born. By the time I was old enough to know what the nightly news was she was largely off television. These newspaper clippings gave me some clue about just what a phenomenon she had been and since most of them were written with the amazement usually reserved for child prodigies and dog acts, the clippings also gave me a feel for the time in the late 50s and 60s where a woman working in a man’s world was treated with condescension even when she was being praised.

The only thing missing from this page is a sense of the historical anecdotes in the book—behind the scenes stories of LBJ the night after Kennedy was killed, Nixon calling my mother in the middle of the night, and the atmosphere in the city during the 50s and 60s. One hopes though that after you read page 69 you’ll want to turn it and get to that stuff soon enough.

Many thanks to John for the input.

John writes more about the book and his research in this Slate article.

Click here to read an excerpt from On Her Trail.

Howard Kurtz interviewed John about On Her Trail on CNN's "Reliable Sources" this morning. Click here to read the transcript of the interview.

On October 19, John filed a NPR "Day to Day" segment on Nancy Dickerson's pathbreaking role in television journalism. Click here to listen to that report; also at that link, listen to a phone conversation from February 18, 1964, in which Lyndon Johnson rebuffed Nancy Dickerson's request to photograph Jack Valenti for a report.

John Dickerson is apparently Washington's real uniter-not-divider: after all, who else writes a book that is praised by both Peggy Noonan and Al Franken? To read these endorsements and more reviews, click here.

Catch up with John's Slate journalism here, and his articles in TIME here.

Previous "page 69 tests":
Marcus Sakey, The Blade Itself
Randy Boyagoda, Governor of the Northern Province
John Gittings, The Changing Face of China
Rachel Kadish, Tolstoy Lied
Eric Rauchway, Blessed Among Nations
Tim Brookes, Guitar and other books
Ruth Padel, Tigers in Red Weather
William Haywood Henderson, Augusta Locke
Jed Horne, Breach of Faith
Robert Greer, The Fourth Perspective
David Plotz, The Genius Factory
Michael Allen Dymmoch, White Tiger
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy
Tom Lutz, Doing Nothing
Libby Fischer Hellmann, A Shot To Die For
Nelson Algren, The Man With the Golden Arm
Bob Harris, Prisoner of Trebekistan
Elaine Flinn, Deadly Collection
Louise Welsh, The Bullet Trick
Gregg Hurwitz, Last Shot
Martha Powers, Death Angel
N.M. Kelby, Whale Season
Mario Acevedo, The Nymphos of Rocky Flats
Dominic Smith, The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre
Simon Blackburn, Lust
Linda L. Richards, Calculated Loss
Kevin Guilfoile, Cast of Shadows
Ronlyn Domingue, The Mercy of Thin Air
Shari Caudron, Who Are You People?
Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics
John Sutherland, How to Read a Novel
Steven Miles, Oath Betrayed
Alan Brown, Audrey Hepburn's Neck
Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale

--Marshal Zeringue

Another view of "The Road"

Stephen Amidon reviewed Cormac McCarthy's The Road for the Sunday Times (London).

I think Amidon gets McCarthy's style right. His closing paragraph:

One of the wonders of McCarthy’s style is that it manages to be both archaic and immediate, as if the prophet Jeremiah had found work as a Detroit crime reporter or a Darfur war correspondent. Near the novel’s end, father and son briefly rest on a highway above a dead swamp, and the view seems to be right back to the beginning of time. “Perhaps in the world’s destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence.” If there is relief on offer from The Road’s grim mayhem, it is to be found in the desolate beauty of its vision, not in the ephemeral consolation of a nurturing human relationship.

William Kennedy also wrote a fine review for the New York Times Sunday Book Review.

Click here for my review.

--Marshal Zeringue

Manolo Blahnik & "Madame Bovary"

To celebrate its 60th anniversary, Penguin Classics invited some leading designers to create new covers for their favorite novels.

The shoe designer Manolo Blahnik designed the cover for Madame Bovary. Here's his explanation behind the cover:

I love Penguin. I had the orange and white paperbacks on my shelf when I was a boy in the Canary Islands, so I have a strong affection for them. As a child I used to hear my mother say how wonderful Flaubert was, and Madame Bovary was her favourite of his novels, so I read it when I was about 12, but didn't enjoy it that much at all. Later, when I was living in Geneva, I saw a wonderful movie of L'Éducation sentimentale that pushed me to read Madame Bovary again, and I was absolutely enchanted by it. It gave me an incredible passion for Flaubert's writings. Madame Bovary is particularly attractive to me because it is a very dramatic story, with this woman's incredible desire, and a compulsion to dress all the time. She didn't have much money and had to borrow from the draper, but she spent everything she had on wonderful, beautiful textiles and dresses. It is something that a modern woman can understand.

Doing illustrations for books isn't familiar terrain to me, but I love challenges. My cover is a picture of a lady with a man's hands stretching from behind a curtain to touch her lovely bottom. She is dressed in a wonderful chiffon peignoir, or dressing-gown, and mules - like the slippers ladies put on before they went to bed in those days. It's a fun cover. Maybe I should have been more respectful, done a more solemn drawing in homage to Flaubert - but it isn't a solemn novel. My design was inspired by the golden era of English drawing typified by Cecil Beaton and Oliver Messel. I tried to remember the kind of illustrations that Beaton did in the 1940s to 1960s, like those for Nancy Mitford's Don't Tell Alfred, and this is what I tried to re- create. At the same time, I tried to make it like a cheap novelette from nowadays. I don't know if it is very good or not, but I quite like it.

The price on the Blahnik-covered Madame Bovary: £100.00.

Tender Is the Night, Crime and Punishment, Lady Chatterley's Lover, and The Idiot also get the designer treatment. Read all about it here.

Related items here on the blog:
A fashion editor's top books on shoes
Attractive author, seductive book
Books and their covers
Judging a book by its cover

--Marshal Zeringue

Scandinavia's greatest living poet

"[Tomas] Tranströmer is not only Scandinavia's greatest living poet, but also widely regarded as one of our most important contemporary international writers." So says Robin Robertson, himself a poet of some considerable reputation.

Tranströmer's is a poetry of sharp contrast and duality - a double world of dark and light, inside and outside, dreaming and waking, man and machine, stillness and turmoil - and he is fascinated by the pressure between the world we know and the hidden world we cannot deny. He continually returns to symbolism that stands in opposition to the natural world: the bureaucratic, the technological and, most specifically, the car, the driver, the mass movement of traffic. The image of man as a diminished, vulnerable creature - distanced from nature, protected by his machine but open to sudden accident - is a recurring one, and this combination of a natural landscape and abrupt, violent meetings with the mechanical, the unnatural, is a hallmark of his work.

What happens at this moment of collision is vividly portrayed: the split-second of shock, of vertigo, where the nerves start to register panic and calamity, where the mind starts to fight against the body's accelerating fear. The eerie coolness and detachment of these poems, rooted as they are in quotidian reality, allows him to present the intrusion of irrational forces as primal threats; the poems can be seen as staged confrontations between the deracinated modern human sensibility and the unseen, unconscious forces - ancient, mysterious and implacable - that sleep beneath our waking minds.

Read the rest of Robertson's essay here.

Click here to read Tranströmer's poem, "A Few Moments"; here for "After a Death"; and here for "Outskirts."

There are three more Tranströmer poems here.

Click here to read Robin Robertson's "Ictus," which is dedicated to Tranströmer.

Scandinavia-related blog posts include:
Scandinavian children's literature
More Swedish Noir

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: "The Blade Itself"

Marcus Sakey's The Blade Itself hits bookstores in a couple of months. The advance word on the novel is pretty amazing, and you can get a taste of the prose here.

I asked Marcus to apply the "page 69 test" to his book. Here is what he reported:

Page 67, 68, 69….shit.

Page 69 is the beginning of a chapter. With formatting, less than half a page. So what already seems a tricky test—hoping that a single page part way in will be not only interesting, but also somehow symbolic of the capital-N Novel as a whole—this feat now has 50% of the space to work in.

Shit.

Let’s try page 96 instead.

Would you believe it? Also the start of a chapter.

Two lessons to be drawn here: first, obviously the universe wants me to work with half a page, and second, I should write longer chapters.

Still, far be it from me to argue with the universe. Here’s page 69 of my debut novel The Blade Itself, coming this January:

CHAPTER 13: Better to Roar

The edge of the switchblade glowed with a liquid shimmer, but he’d broken out the whetstone anyway. Patrick held the knife at thirty degrees and stroked in a practiced motion. Once, twice, three times. With each rasping stroke, he remembered last night, and felt a surge of heat and bile.

“He pulled a piece on you?”

“Just let me see it, like it was an accident. Then asked when Karen would be home.”

Poor Danny had been trying to play it cool, but it hadn’t been hard to spot the fury beneath his words. And something else, too. A weird kind of helplessness it killed Patrick to see. He knew what it was; Danny was a civilian now.

And civilians were prey.

He’d raised a burr on one side of the knife, so he flipped it over and began work on the other.

I could explain what’s going on here, that Patrick is the beautiful loser of a best friend to my protagonist, a retired thief named Danny Carter. I could explain that the “he” who pulled a gun is another friend from the old neighborhood, a guy they once trusted with their lives, but who came out the far end of a seven-year maximum security sentence warped and hard, making demands that Danny doesn’t want to pay.

But instead I’d like to say I’m now a believer. Granted, a test group of one is not exactly scientific, but still, if you have a liberal interpretation—and when it comes to judging my own work, I’m as liberal as they come—this page does play into the themes. The Blade Itself is a thriller, yes, but it’s also a class novel about the cost of mistakes and the way the past haunts the future. And I feel like a hint of that nudges out of the end of the passage.

But if you aren’t impressed, let me say that this chapter also includes a humorous anecdote about a stripper, a reference to Marlon Brando, a heartfelt speech, and the line, “No point being bad if you didn’t look good.”

So hopefully page 69 would at least make you want to turn to page 70.

Many thanks to Marcus for the feedback.

I wasn't kidding about the early word on The Blade Itself: it's got glowing blurbs from the likes of George Pelecanos, Ken Bruen, Lee Child, Sarah Weinman, and others. And excellent advance reviews:

"Sakey's brilliant debut, a crime novel set in Chicago, is a must read. From the thrilling opening...to the riveting ending, the tension ratchets up to almost unbearable levels."
--Publishers Weekly Starred Review

"What a thrilling ride debut author Sakey has concocted."
--Library Journal Starred Review

"Gritty and full of tension...sure to launch Sakey to the top of the new crime writers list."
--BookSense

Here's a link to an excerpt from The Blade Itself.

Marcus is a founding member of The Outfit Collective, a group blog of Chicago crime novelists including Libby Hellmann, Michael Allen Dymmoch, Sean Chercover, and Kevin Guilfoile. He also runs with Killer Year, an elite society of debut mystery and thriller writers with books coming out in 2007.

Previously here on the blog: I quizzed Marcus about why his bookshelf has so many more male authors than females. Click here to read his reply.

Previous "page 69 tests":
Randy Boyagoda, Governor of the Northern Province
John Gittings, The Changing Face of China
Rachel Kadish, Tolstoy Lied
Eric Rauchway, Blessed Among Nations
Tim Brookes, Guitar and other books
Ruth Padel, Tigers in Red Weather
William Haywood Henderson, Augusta Locke
Jed Horne, Breach of Faith
Robert Greer, The Fourth Perspective
David Plotz, The Genius Factory
Michael Allen Dymmoch, White Tiger
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy
Tom Lutz, Doing Nothing
Libby Fischer Hellmann, A Shot To Die For
Nelson Algren, The Man With the Golden Arm
Bob Harris, Prisoner of Trebekistan
Elaine Flinn, Deadly Collection
Louise Welsh, The Bullet Trick
Gregg Hurwitz, Last Shot
Martha Powers, Death Angel
N.M. Kelby, Whale Season
Mario Acevedo, The Nymphos of Rocky Flats
Dominic Smith, The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre
Simon Blackburn, Lust
Linda L. Richards, Calculated Loss
Kevin Guilfoile, Cast of Shadows
Ronlyn Domingue, The Mercy of Thin Air
Shari Caudron, Who Are You People?
Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics
John Sutherland, How to Read a Novel
Steven Miles, Oath Betrayed
Alan Brown, Audrey Hepburn's Neck
Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale

--Marshal Zeringue

Five riveting novels about terrorism

Gerald Seymour, whose novel The Unknown Soldier I praised here, named five novels that "depict terrorism with riveting authority" for Opinion Journal.

Here is part of his list:

Black Sunday by Thomas Harris (Putnam, 1975)

A brilliant read, I promise it: A terrorist conspiracy targets the Super Bowl. Thomas Harris, a former Associated Press reporter, knows how security apparatchiks operate, but the author of "The Silence of the Lambs" (1988) also tells a hell of a good story. Thriller writers tend not to be proud; certainly they do not usually pretend to have discovered life's great truths. The story rules, and the crucial question is: "What if . . .?" In this case, it is: What if Arab terrorists so detest the U.S. that they use a blimp to try to kill the president and 80,000 football fans in New Orleans on the big day? Here's the biggest compliment on offer to a popular novelist: I couldn't put it down.

The Little Drummer Girl by John le Carré (Knopf, 1983)

The Middle East has been kind to thriller writers, probably rated second as a banker zone after the Cold War--but in the "terrorism" field, the little low-intensity wars of the Arabs and Israelis sit on top of the heap. Le Carré is, of course, a writer of eminence, and his foray into the world of ruthless Palestinian guerrilla leaders and hugely professional Mossad counter-terrorist officers can only be memorable. "The Little Drummer Girl," in which a young British woman is drawn into the deadly brinkmanship between the two camps, was written more than two decades ago, but with its sense of location and atmosphere it has not been bettered. Le Carré gives us not only the bones that we find in broadsheets and on newscasts but also flesh and sinew--plenty of it.

The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth (Viking, 1971)

Yes, this is a terrorism story: A dissident political group in Paris in 1963 hires an amoral marksman to assassinate the French head of state, Charles de Gaulle. It didn't actually happen, of course, so before we've read the first page we know that the murder attempt will fail . . . and yet we read on. We scowl and snarl at any interruption. Forsyth changed the face of thriller writing and I believe--allow me a moment of pomposity--created the most satisfying edge-of-the-seat read of my adult life. He moved the style on. Before Forsyth, the top cats were Alistair MacLean and Ian Fleming, who peddled fine fantasies, but they were supplanted by the gritty realism of the "Jackal." Forsyth, and his story of a counter-terrorism investigation against the clock, has been much imitated but never surpassed.

Click here to read about the remaining titles on Seymour's list.

--Marshal Zeringue