Book Recs of the Day 2/16-2/19/2008

In 1878, travel lover Clemens went to Europe, and this volume, published in 1880, was a sort of sequel to Innocents Abroad. His whimsical, clumsy drawings from the first edition are included in most modern editions as well, along with the classic “The Awful German Language,” a hilarious account of his struggles with what he found to be a tongue-twisting torture machine. Throughout Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, the narrator and his friends, though ostensibly on a healthful walking tour, are constantly hopping into or onto the nearest barge, steamboat, train, or funicular. A must read from the irrepressible, inimitable American master.

A TRAMP ABROAD, by Mark Twain (1880; Penguin Classics, 1997)

Five Points, saloons, gangs, criminals, trains, low life, saloons, pushcarts, Orchard Street, Tammany Hall, whores, more saloons, Fourteenth Street . . . If you love New York, if you have a breath of life in your body, you have to love this book. And the writing! In a league with Joseph Mitchell’s Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage, 1993).

LOW LIFE: LURES AND SNARES OF OLD NEW YORK, by Luc Sante (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003)

LINCOLN’S DARK SIDE

After years of research into Lincoln’s history of melancholy, Joshua Wolf Shenk shows us a side of the president that has never been seen before. We not only come to better understand Lincoln’s depression and how it shaped his extraordinary achievement, we also gain a clearer and richer understanding of the nature of depression itself. Lincoln’s Melancholy was named one of the best books of 2005 by both The Washington Post and The New York Times.

LINCOLN’S MELANCHOLY: HOW DEPRESSION CHALLENGED A PRESIDENT AND FUELED HIS GREATNESS, by Joshua Wolf Shenk (Mariner Books, 2006)

Reprinted after deafening clamor from the smitten readers of this 2001 book, Disturbances in the Field is routinely described by anyone who has read it as without question the best novel they’ve ever read. Now, you might quibble, but was Bo Derek a 10? Readers also say, brace yourself. Life ain’t easy, and neither are the truths here.

DISTURBANCES IN THE FIELD, by Lynne Sharon Schwartz (Counterpoint Press, 2005)

Also by Lynne Sharon Schwartz: The Writing on the Wall (Counterpoint Press, 2005), a love story set against the events of September 11, and Ruined by Reading: A Life in Books (Beacon Press, 1997), a book that makes you fall in love with books all over again.