I urge you to come to hear John Pipkin introduce his novel WOODSBURNER at the store next week on July 1. I cannot think of a first time novel that impressed me more than Woodsburner. The title is off-putting; it was for me. But the book sings. This highly original story takes place in the area around Concord, Massachusetts, and is a brilliant picture of the new America in the 1840s. The book revolves around an actual incident: a forest fire Henry Thoreau accidentally started when he attempted to fry some fish he had caught.

I hope that you will come and listen to John. It is so difficult for an unknown novelist to break through to new readers – even if you get the kinds of reviews that Woodsburner has received.

From a May 1 review by Brenda Wineapple in The New York Times:

Pipkin ... beguilingly conjures an assortment of appealing characters who find themselves in or near the Concord woods the day Thoreau set fire to them. Eliot Calvert is a would-be playwright and Boston bookseller who sacrifices his literary ambition (his major dramatic opus would end with a conflagration that consumes the stage) to a life of quiet desperation, selling pornographic pictures to support himself and his family in a manner befitting Beacon Hill. Irish-born Emma Woburn collects books, beautiful books, that she, being illiterate, cannot read, and discovers in a slim volume of Edgar Allan Poe one of Calvert’s pornographic pictures, hidden there by her alcoholic husband. The Rev. Caleb Ephraim Dowdy, an opium-smoking fire-and-brimstone Bible-thumper, craves purification through flame to ease his agnostic doubts; he even overheats the church where he preaches so his congregation can experience a little of the damnation that lies in store. A persecuted lesbian couple from Kutna Hora, Bohemia, sustain their passion among the forest herbs of the New World, and a self-reliant loner, Oddmund Hus... dreams of Emma Woburn.

From a review by Washington Post literary critic Ron Charles.

Over the course of this momentous day, Pipkin moves back in time and across the Atlantic, describing several other characters whose lives are lit by their own fires and altered by Thoreau's conflagration.
The ingenious nature of this structure grows clearer with each haunting chapter. The fire that "flows like brilliant liquid" through Concord Woods is a natural engine for a terrifically exciting story, and Pipkin conveys such a visceral impression of the "clever flames crouching in the branches" that you can feel the heat radiating off these pages.

You would expect Thoreau to dominate this story, but he falls away for long sections. When he does appear, though, he speaks and thinks in a mixture of innocence, self-righteousness, apprehension and nobility. Pipkin, who was born and raised in Baltimore, attends precisely to the details of Thoreau's life, his descriptions in The Journal and even the epigraphic phrases of Walden.

 

 

I can hardly recall a better season for new hardback and paperback fiction. I was glad to see the stand-alone issue of Book World in the Sunday Post, but I was disappointed that it did not convey how rich this book season is, one of the best that I can remember. Please look through our Summer Reading Guide. Pick up a print copy in the store or browse through it on the website by clicking here.

Last week, I was interviewed on Book TV, and I was a wind-up booklover: Richard Hall, our wonderful C-Span producer, never had to ask me a single question. I talked for eleven minutes about new books. He even had to cut the interview for the website! You can click here for my recommendations or if you want to see the interview, click here.

Immigration: I have always been drawn to books about immigration. Barbara says that I never met a book about Ellis Island that I didn’t like. However, the books don’t have to start (or end) at Ellis Island for me to like it. For instance, these wonderful Canadian books don’t - Peter Behrens’s The Law of Dreams, a Dickensian story about a lad’s long journey from Ireland, and one of my all time favorites, Alistair MacLoed’s No Great Mischief, (but they are about the immigrant experience!)

This summer the immigration books that take place in the United States include:

WOODSBURNER - This extraordinary first novel by John Pipkin predates Ellis Island since it takes place in the 1840s when the Czechs and the Norwegians and Irish were an early group of immigrants to the new United States.

The touching, romantic BROOKLYN by Colm Tóibín is about an Irish woman who leaves her poor village just after WWII.

Luis Alberto Urrea’s sweetly humorous INTO THE BEAUTIFUL NORTH appropriately is about some of the newest immigrants to the U.S. - Mexicans seeking a better future.

Two novels show how immigration in twenty-first century Britain has forever changed that Anglo-Saxon bastion – IN THE KITCHEN by Monica Ali (also reviewed in the Post on Sunday) and THE ROAD HOME by Rose Tremain (now in paperback). Both take place in the kitchens of London and show how newcomers are struggling for their place in their new country.

South Asia: I think the reason that we are all in love with South Asian novels is: 1) the use of English – not quite a foreign language, but mastered as if it were; and 2) narrative. I crave story; sometimes postmodern is fun, but I really love a long story with lots of characters. Hence, in this group, I recommend:

CUTTING FOR STONE, about a set of twins born to an Indian nurse in Ethiopia, has a large cast of Indian and Ethiopian characters. Dr. Abraham Verghese’s polished prose makes the book completely engrossing.

Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra is a marvelous vacation book about good pitted against evil in the teeming city of Calcutta.

In the interview, I actually started by saying what I wouldn’t talk about – three novels, recently released in paperback, that don’t need any endorsements, but I will mention them here because two of them fit into my categories. The elegant post 9/11 NETHERLAND is about a Dutch man in New York (don’t forget Joseph O’Neill is coming to Politics & Prose next week); THE GUERNSEY LITERARY AND POTATO PEEL SOCIETY is a bestselling hit (the wonderful Annie Barrows garnered a crowd of 300 last week); and Jhumpa Lahiri’s UNACCUSTOMED EARTH fits both of my categories above, South Asian and immigrant.

LUIS URREA was to have presented his new book INTO THE BEAUTIFUL NORTH at Politics and Prose last Monday. He had to cancel that morning because of a death in the family. In his writing, Luis Urrea (pronounced oo-ray-uh) straddles Mexico and the U.S. He is an exceptionally engaging writer and I was very sorry to miss hosting him. Because I have enjoyed his books so much, I want to widen his readership at Politics and Prose. He received his education in the U.S. and writes in English but his writing is deeply influenced by his Mexican heritage.  

INTO THE BEAUTIFUL NORTH tells the story of a couple of young people who leave their little Mexican town for the United States to bring back seven brave men to save their town, Tres Camarones, from the drug gangsters who terrorize it.  (They have just seen the movie of The Magnificent Seven with Yul Brynner). Nayeli and her gay friend start in Los Angeles and end up looking for Nayeli’s father in Illinois. What a premise and what fun the book is!

THE HUMMINGBIRD’S DAUGHTER is about an earlier period in Mexican history, the terrible dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz. Teresita, an illegitimate peasant girl, is a dearly beloved healer for the poor peasants in Northern Mexico and becomes a threat to the regime. This tale, based on events that actually did happen in the late 19th century, is filled with lush detail and somehow, in spite of my skeptical disbelief in miracles, works well.

I read both Hummingbird’s Daughter and Into the Beautiful North during the P&P annual trip to Mexico.

 

 

Amos Elon, a literary towering figure of Israel’s post-independence generation, died of leukemia this week. One of my favorite books in the last twenty years is THE PITY OF IT ALL: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch 1743-1933. Elon tells the story of the marvelous cultural explosion that took place when the Jews moved to Germany. Two cultures were fused and produced years of exciting art, literature, philosophy, music.  As Elon sees it, little about The Third Reich and the Holocaust was preordained. Yes, there was anti-Semitism; yes, there was separation, but without Hitler, without the Depression, without the humiliation of World War I, Jews and non-Jews might still be living side by side in Germany.  There is brilliance and urgency in Elon’s writing and his depiction of major cultural figures. The part they played in the history of 19th century Germany is illuminating.

My mother Edith Furstenberg is 99 years old this week. That’s an amazing milestone and a particularly happy one since she is still mentally and physically able. This seems like the appropriate place to talk about her contributions since she and my father Frank were entirely supportive of my crazy idea to open a bookstore in Northwest Washington, and, in fact, lent me – what was for them – a good sum of money. That they were supportive of my intention to start a business was somewhat unexpected since my father, a physician, and my mother, a social worker, expected all of their six children to be professional do-gooders.

My parents were staunch Roosevelt supporters, and my entire family was involved in promoting equal rights for minorities. I was expected to march in that same parade, and I did for a long time. I was a city planner, and I worked for twenty years on local and national housing advocacy issues. I still might be working at it if the job market for do-gooders had not shrunk during the Reagan administration.

When the store was opened, my father had already begun his last decade with advancing Parkinsons. Nonetheless, buoyed by my mother’s determination, he did attend many talks in the old store. But by the time we moved across the street (1989), he was extremely debilitated, and my mother came without him. I have a photo of her sitting behind the cash register area in the old store. They both took pride in what Barbara and I built. My mother still wants to know who is speaking each week and what the good new books are.

She is not a fervid reader; she’s a self-described people person. And that is what she is, interested in everybody. She is the embodiment of the advice from all of the books about aging: stay busy; stay connected.

Congratulations on your example, Mom, and thanks for all the help!

Mother’s Day has come and gone, but most of us (mothers or children) are always interested in books on that enduring subject. Let me recommend two sons’ wonderful non-fiction contributions. Steve Luxenberg of The Washington Post has written ANNIE’S GHOSTS, a compassionate investigation into the life of his mother’s sister and why his beloved mother never revealed her sister's existence.

In fact, Beth Luxenberg emphatically declared to everyone that she was an only child. It was only as she was dying that her sons began to hear about a mysterious sister. Steve Luxenberg decides to return to the Detroit of his childhood. He remembers his Bubbe and Zayde’s small apartment and their struggle for a foothold in America. He visits the houses where his own parents lived after World War II and reaches out to as many of her friends from his mother’s youth as he can track down. Most revealing are his interviews with a cousin - Anna Oliweck, who survived World War II and actually lived with his mother’s family when she arrived in the United States.

Anna reveals how ashamed his mother Beth was about her mentally retarded and disturbed sister, Annie.  Annie was admitted to Eloise, a mental hospital, at the age of 20 and lived there until her death 30 years later. It was Anna, not Beth, who drove Steve’s grandmother to the mental hospital, because Luxenberg’s mother would never visit her. Annie’s Ghosts is as much a history of the treatment of mental illness in the twentieth century as it is a family history. Imagine an institution that warehoused many thousands of people, many of whom were never visited, never treated. Yet, Luxenberg did find records with detailed information and several psychiatrists who made empathic comments that helped him in his quest.

Steve Luxenberg will be hosted by Sixth & I Historic Synagogue for an author event and booksigning on Tuesday, May 26. Click here for details.

In a very different book, BITTERSWEET : Lessons from My Mother's Kitchen, Matt McAllester, also a journalist, reaches out after the death of his mentally ill mother, Ann, to reclaim her memory. Matt wishes to recollect her as a dynamic young woman and bring his own life in focus after burning out as a war correspondent. One way he finds is cooking from her cookbooks and remembering their lives together.

Bittersweet is an odd combination of Matt’s memories of his youth, his war stories, and his tender marriage to Pernilla. All of this is woven together with some of the recipes from his mother’s cookbooks and his own experiences in cooking them. The cooking angle works well to shield the reader from the harsh reality of his mother’s emotional deterioration. Her illness and the family’s struggle to maintain equilibrium are the most salient memories that Matt carries of his mother. “In trying to bring her back to me, I had never really intended to revisit my mother’s darkest years. They turned out to be inescapable and unavoidable.” This lovely book represents an effort to bring his life together.

 

READ READ READ!!!

There are so many great books this spring - really wonderful new novels, and some by new writers. Please take a chance; you won’t be disappointed. Stack them up till you have a rainy Sunday or an evening alone to plunge in. We are offering this title at 20% off to members off through Memorial Day.

Many months ago, I read a pre-publication novel called Woodsburner. Yes, the title put me off, too, but when I began to read it, I was immediately absorbed by the sinewy writing and the skill that John Pipkin showed in designing the novel. The woodsburner was a deeply depressed Henry David Thoreau. When fishing one April day in 1844, he decided cook his catch even though the woods were extremely dry. A fire started, and for the next few hours, the entire population in and around Concord was mobilized to put the fire out before the beautiful town burned down. Pipkin invented principal characters as important as Thoreau himself: a fundamentalist preacher, Caleb Dowdy, who sees the fire as a scourge for the sins of men; a Norwegian immigrant who is emotionally stunted by his tragic journey to America; and a bookseller named Eliot Calvert, who happens to be in Concord searching for a new location (and gives Pipkin the opportunity to make some astringent comments about writing and publishing!)

Pipkin asks us to consider what the new world offered people and how easily they could squander the opportunities, by wasting the physical landscape and their chance to start anew. You may have missed the Washington Post review last Wednesday by Washington’s own Pulitzer Prize winning critic, Ron Charles. Here, is what I wrote in my book journal: A remarkable debut – the words leap gorgeously from the pages and the characters are sharply etched. Mr. Pipkin will be reading and speaking at the store on July 1.

 

I think a book reviewer should write with a reader in mind. If we are interested in the subject, will we learn something?  Will we be entertained by the book? Does the novelist convey something interesting, something profound, about human beings, or about the times in which they lived?

With these standards in mind, here are three new books that I promise you will like:  ALL THE LIVING, an elegant first novel by C.E. Morgan that takes place in Kentucky; A LUCKY CHILD, about surviving the Holocaust by Thomas Buergenthal; and a get-even book by Isabel Gillies called HAPPENS EVERY DAY. 

ALL THE LIVING is about Aloma, a young woman who has just graduated from college andjoins her lover Orren on his tobacco farm in eastern Kentucky. Orren’s folks died in a tragic accident three weeks before Alona arrived, leaving Orren to mourn and to keep the subsistence farm together. The farm is three miles from the crossroads where the grocery store is and more miles to the nearest town; the work is backbreaking and depends on the vagaries of the weather. The two young people do not know how to ask for what they need from one another. This is the first book for C.E. Morgan, a young woman living in Kentucky like her protagonist, and what a rare and beautiful book it is.

In A LUCKY CHILD: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz, Thomas Buergenthal tells about his childhood, the six years that he spent trying to survive - first, the Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe, and, then, three concentration camps. He was lucky; he was overlooked during selections and protected by various people; and his mother survived as well. He tells his story with simplicity and even a sense of wonder that it really happened, and that it happened to him. He is currently serving as the American judge on the International Court of Justice. The fact that as a lawyer and law professor Thomas Buergenthal specializes in human rights reflects his experiences as a child.

HAPPENS EVERY DAY tells about the all-too-common story of a woman who thought she had a perfect life, a happy marriage and two small sons. After Isabel Gillies moved with her husband from New York to a small college town, and thought she had made a good adjustment, he announced that he had fallen in love with one of her friends. Gillies tells her story with the wry humor that comes after time and distance (not to mention a new and happy marriage).

Sometimes I am dissatisfied with book reviews from Book World or the New York Times Book Review. As a bookstore owner, I read a lot and recommend books with descriptions that I hope will encourage you to want to read them, too. To be fair, a book critic plays it straight. He tells you how the author has succeeded or failed in what he/she is trying to do. Still, I often feel that books which few people are interested in are reviewed and wonderful books like these three are overlooked.

 

I loved the new book WHEN SKATEBOARDS WILL BE FREE by Said Sayrafiezadeh.  His name might make you think that he is from Iran – and indeed, his father, whom he hardly knew, was;  but, his mother was actually an American Jew, the sister of writer Mark Harris. She had been married to an Iranian refugee, who left the family when Said was less than a year old. Oh, no, you might think, not another sad story about abandonment. Well, this is really different. Said does tell the story of a pretty miserable childhood spent among comrades of the Socialist Workers Party, a small group of dedicated Trotskyites waiting for the imminent revolution. However, Said recognizes the irony and even funny aspects of that benighted band and of his parents, most of all.

Dwight Garner wrote a boffo review for the April 1st New York Times, and by coincidence, I had just finished reading the book the night before. In his review, Dwight Garner called the book "delicate and discerning" with "free floating humor." A childhood among the Socialist Workers, waiting for the imminent revolution, was full of irony, as Garner says, since all the parent-comrades offered was poverty and abandonment. Garner claimed that the SWP was not a cult, but I disagree. There never was an empirical evidence to back up their beliefs. Indeed, the evidence always went the other way. Nevertheless, the members held fast, and when they didn’t, they were expelled for deviationism.

In the midst of this background, it is puzzling that Said kept his father’s unpronounceable name, while his older brother and sister, who knew their father much better, followed the examples of their uncle and mother and changed their names to Harris. He partially explains his decision when he describes how he was raised, in a revolutionary spirit, to view his father not as “a man who had abandoned me but a noble man of adventure who had no choice but to abandon me.” Perhaps, he also retained it as a symbol of the embattled childhood which he survived.

But whatever his reasoning, we are now pleased to introduce this talented writer Said Sayrafiezadeh. Learn to say his name, Garner advises - “(say-RAH-fee-ZAH-day.) Because it’s one that you may want to remember and be able to speak aloud, if this exacting and finely made first book is any indication.”

 

Mary Pipher introduced her new book SEEKING PEACE at the store last Saturday. Those of us who heard her were deeply impressed with her warmth and candor. A clinical psychologist by training, Mary Pipher wrote a huge bestseller 15 years ago called Reviving Ophelia which catapulted her from an everyday person with a career and a family to a sought-after celebrity. Her new book tells about her inability to meet those expectations, which resulted in, what she calls, a meltdown or clinical depression.

Based on her work as a psychotherapist for adolescent females, Pipher argued in Reviving Ophelia that teen-aged girls were coming of age in "a girl-poisoning culture;" and she offered suggestions for ways by which girls can build and maintain their self images.  At a time when American education was attempting to deal with girls “losing their voices” in adolescence, the book struck a chord and was widely read and discussed. Since then, she has written a number of other books which have been well-received, but none has benefited from the timing – the perfect book at the perfect time -- that Reviving Ophelia represented.

Seeking Peace is an autobiographical work, a journey through self to find out why she became depressed. “For a decade I had roared through a life of adrenaline surges and constant pressure to achieve more, better and faster.” She remembers her own childhood and her intellectual awakening in college.  She admits to herself the bad times she had as a child in her family and the small town they lived in. She talks about her healing. She asked her doctor for antidepressants. She simplified her life - seeing fewer people, taking on fewer engagements. Later, she began to meditate. “My misery forced me to reflect, which led me to slow down and take better care of myself. These actions propelled me to meditation, which fostered calmness and an appreciation of the moment.”

I think many readers will learn from Mary Pipher’s candid discussion of her breakdown and her recovery. By asking ourselves questions and listening to our answers, by seeking help and giving ourselves space – these are ways of bringing peace to our own lives.

 

 

 

Just before I went to Mexico, I hosted a very talented, young Pakistani DANIYAL MUEENUDDIN for his new book IN OTHER ROOMS, OTHER WONDERS. Three of these stories were published in the New Yorker, and it was clear that he had already established a following. Daniyal commands a pivotal position to interpret modern Pakistan to American audiences. He wrote an introduction which describes his history. His father was a landowner, from what he calls "the old Punjabi feudal class," who met his mother, an American reporter with the Washington Post, while he was in the U.S. negotiating a treaty.

Daniyal grew up in Pakistan living in Lahore, spending vacations on the farm now described in his stories. He attended boarding school in Massachusetts and Dartmouth College. He said that his father began sending "increasingly pressing letters, telling me I must return to Pakistan and take care of the family property." When he returned, he learned that the managers had been stealing from his father and he "decided to stay and fight it out." His father died, but he learned how to manage the farm and stay afloat.

Six years later, he decided to return to the West, applied to Yale Law School, and was accepted. After graduation, he took a job at a New York firm. He realized, "I was in a unique position to write these stories for a Western audience -- stories about the farm and the old feudal ways, the dissolving feudal order and the new way coming...I resigned from the law firm, returned to Pakistan, and began writing the stories."

We hosted a very large crowd on February 24th, the night Daniyal read, much larger than most authors of first books garner. There was a mixture of family (Daniyal's brother lives in Washington), friends, and many people drawn to hear the young author from his stories in the New Yorker.

I felt, wow, a star is born.

 

 

 

REPORT ON MEXICO

We have just returned from our annual Politics and Prose trip to Mexico. Mexico has a stupendous climate, world class museums, and comfortable accommodations.

We were shocked to find that American tourists are warned against traveling to Mexico because of crime. If you are dealing in drugs, Mexico might be dangerous; otherwise, there is far less crime than in the U.S. I think it is highly irresponsible of the State Department and the U.S. to discourage travel to Mexico when it urgently needs American tourists.

But we do not travel to Mexico each winter to bestow American beneficence on the country. We find it fascinating as well as gorgeous. Mexico is a nation of contradictions. While there is much to admire about its immense beauty in both the built and natural environment, governmental corruption weakens the nation’s ability to provide essential services for the huge number of desperately poor. Above all else, I find the uneasy and sometimes combustible mixture produced by the Spanish conquest and the Indian traditional life endlessly interesting.

This year our group visited Mexico City, Puebla, and Oaxaca. Mexico City is a vast sprawling conglomeration that contains 8 million people within its boundaries and 22 million spreading out into other states (think New York City, Westechester, Connecticut, and New Jersey) or between one-fifth and one-fourth of Mexico’s population.  With more art museums than one can visit in an entire week, we rotate our visits each year, but we always visit the great Museum of Anthropology. This huge and architecturally impressive museum is a tribute to the pre-Columbian peoples of Mesoamerica with beautiful artifacts rescued from the ruins, dioramas, reproductions, and lately, a text in English as well as Spanish. And there are other wonderful museums, including a stunning new museum of popular arts.

In fact, that is a major difference between Mexico now and Mexico when my husband David and I fell in love with the country, close to 30 years ago. At that time, the crafts were loved and admired by tourists, but not recognized by the Mexican middle class or even most upper class people. Now, there are a growing number of popular art museums, and we also visited a brand new one near the city of Oaxaca.

Oaxaca has recently undergone a terrible interlude that started with a teachers’ strike. What began as a strike for higher wages and books turned into a general strike demanding the ouster of the governor. The main square was occupied by the strikers, and there were skirmishes between police and strikers accompanied by a considerable amount of violence. It was a very sad and long period during which little was accomplished to help the schools; tourism completely died, many people were out of work, and the region suffered greatly from the long siege. I am happy to report that things seem almost back to normal now. The city – one of my favorite places in the world – looks fine and people are going about their business once again.

Two recent books by Americans provide affectionate and balanced views of Mexico and its relationship to its big neighbor to the north. I am embarrassed to say that I completely missed the reviews of FIRST STOP IN THE NEW WORLD: Mexico City, the Capital of the 21st Century. Thank you to fellow traveler (and longtime P&P Travel Book club member) Janet Cook for bringing this book to my attention. David Lida writes that, in spite of the absence of planning and a “monstrously multiplying population,” “Mexico City is not Calcutta. . . .The residents have running water, electricity and garbage collection, however irregularly.” Lida, a journalist, moved to Mexico City fifteen years ago, and he has deftly painted a portrait of its politics and culture. He loves Mexico but he is well aware of the country’s shortcomings. 

Joseph Contreras, a Newsweek journalist, whose parents are Chicanos, was ambivalent at best when he was assigned Mexico City in the 90s, but he grew to love and appreciate Mexico. He happily returned fifteen years later and could see vast differences in Mexico during the passing years. IN THE SHADOW OF THE GIANT: The Americanization of Modern Mexico is his thoughtful assessment of the changing relationship between his two countries. The Mexico that he first visited was more defensive and less open to the U.S. Now, with the vast number of Mexicans who cross the border and with some positive results from NAFTA (although hardly what we were led to believe), Mexico and the U.S. have grown closer. Many upper level public officials and businesspeople study in the U.S.  Conversely, there are numerous Americans who live in Mexico full-time and part-time, typically “baby boomers who realize they are approaching their golden years with not enough savings to afford a comfortable retirement in the U.S.”

 

 

Now that the inauguration has passed, I finally broke myself of the TV-news habit and have been able to read again. Four books stand out:

• THE ROAD HOME, by the well-regarded British writer Rose Tremain, beautifully conveys the anxiety of an Eastern European immigrant in Britain. 
• MY TWO POLISH GRANDFATHERS, by the architecture critic Witold Rybczynski, is a set of autobiographical essays, which essentially answers the question, "How did you get that name?"
• Australian writer Helen Garner examines the limits of friendship in THE SPARE ROOM.
• British essayist Diana Athill has written a splendid set of essays, SOMEWHERE TOWARDS THE END.

I finally got around to reading ROSE TREMAIN’s new book, THE ROAD HOME (Little Brown, $24.95). She is a versatile British author who ought to be read more widely in the U.S. She often writes intriguing historical novels. One of my favorite historical novels, Restoration, takes place during the post-Cromwell restoration of the King. The main character is Robert Merivel, husband to the King’s mistress. The writing is so well observed that the reader feels part of 17th century England.

Her new book, The Road Home, is a touching and often humorous saga about an immigrant from the former USSR – Ukraine? Byelorussia? – someplace in that cold and backward part of Europe. Lev leaves his mother and little girl to go to England, to make a better life. He takes any job that he can, since he is all but destitute; fortunately, most people are kind. He finally gets a good job in an upscale restaurant where he learns how to cook. His sense of being out of place is never assuaged; as he often thinks about home, stays in touch with his best friend, and works two jobs to save money, planning to return and open his own restaurant.

WITOLD RYBCZYNSKI is a renowned architectural writer. He wrote an excellent biography of Frederick Law Olmstead called A Clearing in the Distance, but he excels at brief mediations on architecture as part of life. This small memoir MY TWO POLISH GRANDFATHERS (Scribner, $25.00) is that and much more. He use essays to explain about his family and education, about who he is and why he is what he is - a humanist interested in how people interact with their surroundings. Rybczynski’s parents both came from distinguished and learned forebearers in pre-World War II Poland. The book is a remembrance of a lost world and as well as an homage to the best of the modern world. I particularly recommend this book to those of you interested in design. I so enjoyed being reminded of architects, buildings, and places that I admire.

The lovely brief novel, THE SPARE ROOM (Henry Holt, $22), by the Australian author HELEN GARNER intelligently illuminates serious life and death issues. When her friend Nicola asks her to provide a room in Melbourne while she seeks treatment for cancer, Helen, of course, agrees. But when Nicola arrives, she is much, much sicker than Helen anticipates. She is trying to evade death, seeking any loony theory and crooked doctor to provide a cure. This puts an impossible physical and emotional burden on Helen who grows angrier and angrier. So The Spare Room is about both the limits of friendship and dying with dignity. Yet the book is not heavy; sad, yes, but leavened with humor and empathy.

“We have contrived to extend our falling way, so that what goes on with it, and how to manage it, is well worth considering.”  DIANA ATHILL ‘s tiny, astringent work called SOMEWHERE TOWARDS THE END (W.W. Norton, $24.95) will especially appeal to readers over 70. I think that I could reread it every few years with pleasure and recognition. Diana Athill was a well known editor for the English publisher André Deutsch; she edited V.S. Naipaul and Elias Canetti among many others. After she retired, she wrote two short books, including Stet about her publishing career. Now she has added this third, ruminating on old age and death. She is very, very English, understated to the point of emotionless, and yet her stiff upper lip serves very well in describing the pain and pleasures of old age. Except that she occasionally sounds smug, she makes a most agreeable companion, as she reflects on her loves and her life and offers some hard-won bits of wisdom to chew on.

 

Wallace Stegner’s 100th birthday was last Wednesday. Timothy Egan marked the event in The New York Times online. If one writer could be said to have inspired the opening of Politics and Prose, it was Wallace Stegner. I read his books during the ′70s, then pressed them on friends, saying, ′′You must read this. I cannot understand how so great an American writer can be relatively unknown! ′′ Soon after the store opened, Mr. Stegner published Crossing to Safety, and our little store forged a bond with him. He visited the store to read, and the line of people waiting to meet him stretched out the door. Two or three years later, after we had moved across the street, his Collected Stories were published, and there were even longer lines! The readers who stood in line marveled to one another that they didn’t know other people who loved Wallace Stegner the way they did.

He was that kind of writer. He inspired a fierce, personal loyalty. He dug underneath the American character and hit bedrock. He understood how women felt about their lives and their loves. He wrote about friendship between men and women and couples. Penguin publishes his books. Of the novels, we can recommend first and foremost ANGLE OF REPOSE, then CROSSING TO SAFETY. Third, I like SPECTATOR BIRD. His stories are perfect. He wrote a great deal of nonfiction about his life and the environment – which were intertwined. I especially admire WOLF WILLOW, an autobiography, and a collection of essays, WHERE THE BLUEBIRD SINGS TO THE LEMONADE SPRING.

It is a shame that Egan used the blog to rehash the complaint that Stegner is not recognized by the Eastern establishment, instead of introducing Stegner to a new audience. Never mind, the bloggers stood in a virtual line to talk about how much they loved Wallace Stegner. I was the 287th person to comment, and this is what I said:

I am fascinated that a supposedly unappreciated writer receives 10 pages of comments from fans of his. When my store Politics and Prose was in its infancy, Crossing to Safety was published. We were able to host Wallace Stegner for a reading then and again when his Collected Stories were published. Both times there were lines out the door to meet Stegner and to have him sign books. As people stood in line, they confided that they didn’t know that so many other people loved Steger’s work.

Perhaps there was more of a geographical distinction made then about books. I don’t think Americans think so much in regional terms as in small town v. urban or maybe even more so in generational terms. Elizabeth Strout’s incisive stories Olive Kitteridge could have taken place anywhere in the U.S. I assume many Latinos (and non-Latinos) admire Junot Díaz in addition to Dominicans.

Just so, we can read Wallace Stegner as commentary on the United States, as the population expanded westward and women became more assertive in their demands for equality. Yes, it has always astounded me that Stegner understood women so well.

Thanks to all of you and especially to Tim Egan for stimulating this discussion. To read Egan’s blog, click here.

 

A very large number of books have been published on how to move forward after the Bush years. One of the most important and far reaching of these is David Sanger’s The Inheritance, which he presented on Saturday. Sanger, chief Washington correspondent for the New York Times, has written a primer for the incoming administration on some of the world’s most troubling issues. (In a few chapters, he distilled the failures of American policy in the Middle East and Asia. He says “Not all of these problems were Bush’s fault ...Yet at the moment when we most needed to act like a truly enlightened superpower, we let fear trump judgment, we depleted our political capital and moral authority...”)

Through a prodigious amount of research and keen analysis, David has given us a reading on how things stand vis-à-vis: Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, North Korea, and China. And he summarizes three other areas of what he calls vulnerability.

At the same time, he manages to completely engage the reader, with history, with personalities, and with wry commentary. Every policy maker in Washington – everybody in the administration and in Congress – will need a copy of this book. He brings into focus many issues that we kind of understood, but not fully or to the extent that is necessary to move in a new direction.

At the end, David Sanger cautions us to be realistic about what President Obama can accomplish. “The crises may be too plentiful and the accompanying expectations too high.”

A few days ago, the artist William Christenberry, who recently retired from almost forty years of teaching at the Corcoran Gallery School of Art, gave a frank, humorous talk about his work. He read pieces from WORKING FROM MEMORY, a series of autobiographical essays that accompany photographs of his work. Bill returns to Hale County, Alabama, every summer and records what has changed and not changed in this still rural area that his family comes from.

It has been fascinating to follow Bill’s work. It reflects his position as somebody who has lived in Washington (Cleveland Park) for forty years and yet pays homage to his native land. It is both deeply embedded in the red soil of Alabama and a commentary on time and change that comes from distance—both time and place. He would not have been able to live in Alabama during the bad years of the past, but he retains a great fondness for his home and Alabama is the motherlode for his work.

He spoke Monday night about the Klan room that he created decades ago—and that I first saw in a wonderful exhibition of Southern art at the Corcoran Gallery in 1982. There were masks and sheets and the whole assemblage is scary because of our associations and because the Klan was meant to scare. Apparently somebody once stole the entire work—a small room full of objects. They (or he) broke into the studio, took the hinges off the door, and removed the entire exhibit. There was no vandalism. The work has never been found. What I saw at the Corcoran 27 years ago was a remake of the original work.

Christenberry’s stories reflect his family's oral tradition, telling stories about home and work and particularly about family. The audience thoroughly enjoyed the stories and Bill's asides. You should ask for a CD of this talk, especially if you buy Working from Memory or his wonderful monograph from 2006, simply titled William Christenberry because it will be fantastic to thumb through the book with Bill's twangy voice explaining the photos and sculptures.

 

Never in our memory have we so yearned for one administration to end and another to begin fresh. We are caught up in the excitement and …
 
Yes, we are ALL expecting too much from the young President-elect.

1. We want him to get the economy moving again: create jobs for those who lost them, help people stay in their homes, and build better bridges to somewhere.  
2. We want him to intervene in the world to reduce tensions between the Islamic world and the West.
3. We want him to withdraw our troops from Iraq, help that divided nation restore comity, and aid the vast number of refugees who have fled.
4. We want him to start programs which reduce carbon impact and slow down global warming, and we want to reduce U.S. dependence on oil.
5. We want him to reform the health-care system.
6. We want him to recommend ways to strengthen social security.
7. We want him to foster a more civil political culture.
8. We want him to help immigrants come to the U.S. legally and we want him to make Americans understand how much immigrants contribute to our nation.
9. We want him to undo all of the bad things that have been done during the last eight years, and especially to restore the rule of law.

Are we going to have disappointments along the way? You bet. But we are going to give President Obama and his team a chance to show what they can do. Are we going to refrain from commenting or advocating for certain policies? Hardly.

My husband David and I both enjoyed Long Time Coming about the 2008 campaign, reported by Newsweek staffers and written by Evan Thomas. In his view the economic collapse and Bush’s low approval rating made a GOP victory impossible. Nevertheless, the Newsweek team credits Obama and his staff with a brilliant campaign and Obama with the vision and discipline to pull off the significant victory. Thomas will appear at Politics and Prose the night after Inauguration. Click here for more about the book.

Like normal people (i.e. people who do not work in bookstores) the best time for me to catch up on my reading is vacation time. . Evan’s new book started off our week of vacation in San Francisco, visiting with our daughter and old friends, reading, and eating at wonderful restaurants

In Evan Thomas’ view the economic collapse and Bush’s low approval rating made a GOP victory impossible. Nevertheless, the Newsweek team credits Obama and his staff with a brilliant campaign and Obama with the vision and discipline to pull off the significant victory. The book starts back at Obama’s arrival in Washington – and even before that when men like Gregory Craig, an old Washington hand close to Ted Kennedy, were “falling in love” with Barack Obama. Thomas calls Obama “something unusual in a politician: genuinely self aware.”

In comparing the Obama campaign with Clinton’s and McCain’s, Evans sees a candidate who stays steady who runs a brilliant campaign on the ground compared to candidates who have difficulty in locating their own keys. McCain appear temperamentally unfit to be President. He shoots from the hip, is impetuous – as exemplified by his choice of Sarah Palin who was not vetted properly either by McCain or his staff.

Interestingly Thomas compares Obama to Ronald Reagan in his desire to map his own way rather than accept received wisdom. “Like Reagan Obama is an astute performer, a maker of myths and a teller of stories.”

Do not miss the interview conducted by Daren Briscoe at the end of the book. Obama reveals himself to be utterly self conscious about who he is and what he represents to voters. It will be exceedingly interesting to observe the Obama Presidency.

WE ARE STILL HOLDING OUR BREATH

I thought that I could stop holding my breath when Barack Obama was elected. But as the economy zooms downward and while there are continuing terrorist attacks, I find that I am still holding my breath. Are we going to make it one more month until the Inauguration? President Elect Obama said that there is only one President at a time. Cong. Barney Frank said, “I'm afraid that overstates the number of presidents we have.”

Congress cannot be expected to provide leadership under most circumstances and certainly not now. Frank goes on to say, "Having lived with this very right wing Republican group that runs the House most of the time, the notion of trying to deal with them as if we could be post-partisan gives me post-partisan depression."

I suppose that the reckoning will come after January 20. The United States has done almost everything wrong that could be done wrong during the last eight years. The remarkable books published during this past year sum up the events of the Bush Administration.

Dexter Filkins of the New York Times wrote a brave book, THE FOREVER WAR, about his observations as a war correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq. “However many Iraqis opposed them before the Americans came into the village, dozens and dozens more did by the time they left. The Americans were making enemies faster than they could kill them."

With ANGLER, Barton Gellman exposed the shadowy puppet master Dick Cheney and his grab of executive power. David Greenberg said in his review in Slate, “There can be no doubt after reading this fair but quietly withering book that Cheney's role in shaping Bush's presidency—governing from the right, not the center; skirting procedures to achieve his goals on taxes and the environment; and above all setting an extremist course in the war against al-Qaida—has been overwhelmingly malign.”

Jane Mayer, in her book THE DARK SIDE, uses the Administration’s own former officials to show how Bush and Cheney blew off any laws that they did not like. In fact, Mayer shows how much more perilous the domestic situation might have become had there not been the modest degree of resistance the White House has received from Congress and other rather courageous members of the executive branch.

Looking forward and discussing picking up the pieces, Andrew Bacevich, Peter Galbraith, Thomas Friedman, Tom Daschle, Chuck Hagel, John Podesta, Jared Bernstein (Biden’s newly appointed economic advisor) have all been at Politics and Prose recently discussing their books both on foreign and domestic policy. Many of them will undoubtedly be serving in the next administration. (Not Friedman, the communicator par excellence, who has done a real service integrating environmental and foreign policy in HOT, FLAT, AND CROWDED.)

In the New Year, we will have a number of new books pertaining to a new day in our Capital. In THE INHERITANCE, David Sanger reviews what the new President will have on his plate from (as they say), Day 1 (Jan. 31).  A panel from the Nation Magazine will gather to discuss CHANGE FOR AMERICA (Jan 19).  Some of these  authors offer a historical perspective, like Adam Cohen, who will present his book on the first 100 days of FDR’s administration, NOTHING TO FEAR  (Jan. 15). Others offer a cultural perspective, such as Gwen Ifill, in THE BREAKTHROUGH (Jan. 24), about the new generation of African American politicians.  Evan Thomas and others from Newsweek will present their thorough look at the Presidential election with LONG TIME COMING (Jan. 21).

 

It can be disconcerting when life imitates art. So it is with the horrible attacks in Mumbai this week. One of my favorite books from 2007 is Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra. This extraordinary story where Mumbai is the central character is full of life-like characters: an underworld boss, a dogged policeman, and scores of others characteristic of the multitudes that make their way to Mumbai. This book is very enjoyable and will bring Western readers closer to India.

No mere police  procedural this, but a deeply political and social commentary on the state of  Indian society. The book is narrated in chapters which alternate  between Ganesh Gatoinde, the Godfather, and the honest policeman, Sartaj Singh.  Ganesh tells his fearsome stories of gang warfare and how he came to be on the  top of the Indian underworld. Sartaj represents the effort to hold back the  tide of corruption and religious fanaticism that threatens to engulf India. An  important theme is the humiliations that many suffered during Partition.  
 
Interviewed on Tuesday,  December 2 on All Things Considered, Chandra said, “In real life, one  of the policemen killed in action during the attacks had spent the past few  months investigating Hindu right-wingers who allegedly were responsible for at  least one blast in India recently.” And when the bombings and attacks began,  "it seemed as if fiction and real life were anticipating each  other.”
 
When you embark on a long  plane ride or on vacation, Sacred Games will be a perfect companion. It  is not a book to take to bed with you – not because it is so scary, but  because it is very long and needs to be read in great swaths at one time.