apckrfan: Book Rec of the Day 3/15-3/20/08

First published in 1948, Wilder’s classic novel captures Julius Caesar and his world as no one since Suetonius. Telling his story through letters and documents, Wilder brings to life every stratum of Caesar’s world, from slum-dwelling plebeians to the rarefied precincts of Marc Antony, Cicero, and, of course, Cleopatra. By the end, one of the great iconic figures in all of history has become a human being—a man aware of his weaknesses as well as his power. This latest edition has an afterword by Tappan Wilder that draws on notes, letters, and journal entries made by the author about the work.

THE IDES OF MARCH, by Thornton Wilder (1948; Harper Perennial, 2003)

DECLINE AND FALL AGAIN

In the Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs and Steel, Diamond described why some civilizations succeed instead of others. In this book, he looks at the collapse of the world of the Norsemen of Greenland, the Maya of Central America, and others. He discovers a “fundamental pattern of catastrophe,” whose elements include environmental damage, climate change, and competing cultures. Does any of this sound familiar from our own place and time? Diamond takes complex matters and makes them into an understandable and absorbing read.

COLLAPSE: HOW SOCIETIES CHOOSE TO FAIL OR SUCCEED, by Jared Diamond (Viking, 2005)

Harris’s Christine Bennett mysteries center around Catholic holidays because our heroine spent her youth in a convent and almost took vows before moving to New York state. The fourth in the series continues to deliver what fans have come to expect: fun nuns; increasing warmth between Christine and Detective Jack Brooks; fast-paced, unexpected turns of plot; and an unexpected solution.

ST. PATRICK’S DAY MURDER, by Lee Harris (Fawcett, 1994)

In this extraordinary work, Pollan traces four meals from farm to plate. Ranging from McDonald’s takeout to a dinner of wild pork and mushrooms that he hunts and gathers himself, each meal teaches us compelling lessons about what we are actually eating and what the costs of our choices are, in terms of our dependence on oil, the toll on the environment, and the health of our bodies. By the end of the book you understand the aptness of the title.

THE OMNIVORE’S DILEMMA: A NATURAL HISTORY OF FOUR MEALS, by Michael Pollan (Penguin, 2006)

In her 14th novel, South African activist, novelist, and winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature Nadine Gordimer turns away from the large humanitarian issues that often lie at the heart of her work to focus on the personal concerns of two upper-middle-class white couples in postapartheid South Africa. In this novel of ideas, the cruelties and pleasures of mortality are a major theme, as are the idiosyncratic patterns of communication that families adopt as they struggle through life-changing events such as illness and adultery.

GET A LIFE, by Nadine Gordimer (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005)

A CHINESE BOX

Hessler, author of the bestselling River Town (about his Peace Corps days in Sichuan Province) and Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker, has lived in China for the last ten years. Here he renders a vivid portrait of an extraordinary nation coming to grips with its emerging place on the world stage. He brings life to his study by focusing largely on people such as the students of Fuling (a town on the Yangtze River), who find themselves in China’s new boom towns, or Chen Mengjia, who studies the oracle bones of the title, the earliest known writing of East Asia. The book is a fascinating tour of present-day China, a country with an unshakable past and one that is moving rapidly into the future.