Book Recs of the Day 2/20-2/24/2008

The author of Salt: A World History; Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World; and The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation turns his omnivorous attention to detailing the history of the oyster and New York City. This engaging account rambles along the wharves and over oyster beds, early haunts of colorful New Yorkers and their pearly gray bivalve friends, the oysters. As usual, a fun romp through food and history.

THE BIG OYSTER: HISTORY ON THE HALF SHELL, by Mark Kurlansky (Ballantine Books, 2006)

READ ME

Baxter, a novelist (The Feast of Love, 2001) and master of the short story, gives us the gift of his laserlike insight and flawless ear for the way people speak and think in this, his fifth novel. Saul and Patsy is mostly an account of how Saul understands himself and Patsy after they move, despite strenuous objections from friends and family, to a semirural town in Michigan, and the couple’s magic circle of love becomes enmeshed in a web—fine, strong, slowly built—of words, feelings, meaning, and consequences.

SAUL AND PATSY, by Charles Baxter (Vintage, 2005)

“We do not need another epic painting, but rather a fresh portrait focused tightly on Washington’s character,” Pulitzer Prize-winner Joseph J. Ellis writes in his preface, and he proceeds to deliver to us a Washington of flesh and blood. Ellis shows us a young Washington experiencing the French and Indian War, where he witnessed horrible massacres and mastered what we now call guerilla warfare. Ellis examines Washington’s marriage to Martha Custis and the changes it worked on him psychologically and economically. Nor does he neglect Washington the president, his vast accomplishments, or his ability to lay that power down when the time came.

HIS EXCELLENCY, GEORGE WASHINGTON, by Joseph J. Ellis (Vintage, 2005)

A BOOK LOVER’S FICTION

In his Thursday Next series, Welsh writer Fforde sets up a parallel universe that The Wall Street Journal calls a mixture of “Monty Python, Harry Potter, Stephen Hawking and Buffy the Vampire Slayer” with a “quirky charm . . . all its own.” Thursday Next is a Special Ops detective, humble yet spunky, traveling back and forth in time through BookWorld to solve book crimes with the help of Miss Havisham, the Cheshire Cat, and other beloved characters. They’re nimble, witty fun. If you like them, try his new series, the Nursery Crimes.

THE EYRE AFFAIR (2003); LOST IN A GOOD BOOK (2004); THE WELL OF LOST PLOTS (2004); SOMETHING ROTTEN (2005), by Jasper Fforde (Penguin Books)

NO PLACE LIKE HOME

Divided into three parts, each devoted to a place the author has loved and lost, Pierson’s study of the unwinnable war between nostalgia and progress is simultaneously an anguished cry, a scathing exposé, and an extended lyric, with regular flashes of humor, sweetness, and bitterness. What it may lack in organization it more than makes up for in good writing and vigorous intellect. It would go nicely on the shelf with Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.

THE PLACE YOU LOVE IS GONE: PROGRESS HITS HOME, by Melissa Holbrook Pierson (W. W. Norton, 2006)