Book Rec of the Day 3/20-3/30/2008

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.

ORACLE BONES: A JOURNEY BETWEEN CHINA’S PAST AND PRESENT, by Peter Hessler (HarperCollins, 2006)

THRILLER FICTION

What better to get you through the dreary doldrums of March than a superb thriller by master of the genre Dean Koontz? Landscaper Mitch Rafferty is minding his own business in the garden when he receives a call from his wife—and we’re off! Holly Rafferty has been kidnapped, and it’s good versus evil as only Koontz can do it, creating a riptide of excitement and dread through the contrast between the ordinariness of the loving gardener and the unspeakable evil of the bad guys.

THE HUSBAND, by Dean Koontz (Bantam, 2006)

IMPRESSIONS OF IMPRESSIONISTS

The author of Brunellischi’s Dome and Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling here turns his powers of observation to 19th-century Paris and the beginning of the Impressionist movement. He concentrates on two very different painters: Ernest Meissonier, a meticulous and hugely successful painter of historical scenes, and Edouard Manet, reviled for his scandalous Le déjeuner sur l’herbe and Olympia. Their lives and careers follow strongly contrasting trajectories, which makes King’s book a wonderful and fascinating read.

THE JUDGMENT OF PARIS: THE REVOLUTIONARY DECADE THAT GAVE THE WORLD IMPRESSIONISM, by Ross King (Walker, 2006)

Though the beloved, effervescent Julia Child didn’t invent the phrase bon appétit, she might as well have. What she did do, with the help, at first, of Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck and then others such as Jacques Pépin, was to bring French cooking into American kitchens. Fitch’s biography ably traces the course of a remarkable career that spanned more than 50 years yet never elicited a mean-spirited word from her or from the countless culinary competitors whom she helped form.

APPETITE FOR LIFE: THE BIOGRAPHY OF JULIA CHILD, by Noel Riley Fitch (Anchor, 1999)

BOOK LOVERS FICTION

A quiet half-light illuminates this story of three generations of Japanese women who settle in Seattle in 1918 and then move back to Japan. Minatoya draws us into deep waters, outlining subtle relationships among vivid personalities constrained within rigid social structures and struggling to find satisfying expression. The consolations of art, patience, love, and history bear beautiful fruit for the characters, as well as for the reader.

THE STRANGENESS OF BEAUTY, by Lydia Minatoya (W. W. Norton, 2001)

YUCK IT UP

This study of New York City’s unlovable vermin reveals them to be even more disgusting than you thought, and infinitely more resourceful and ubiquitous. From the first Rattus norvegicus scurrying over the ropes of ships and onward into the bowels of the city to their incredible zeal for mating, omnivorous feeding habits, and diabolical ability to survive all attempts at eradication, Sullivan’s unusual social and natural history is utterly engrossing even while it grosses you out. Full of little-known facts and arcane glimpses of the way the city works to maintain the uneasy peace between its human and nonhuman residents.

RATS: OBSERVATIONS ON THE HISTORY AND HABITAT OF THE CITY’S MOST UNWANTED INHABITANTS, by Robert Sullivan (Bloomsbury, 2004)

“A wholly absorbing, bizarrely madcap comedy and a telling commentary on the sometimes baffling sources of art. . . . The book is anything but fake. It’s truth, beauty and comedy wrapped in one sprightly package.”—Chicago Tribune

Peter Carey, acclaimed author of Oscar and Lucinda, has concocted a dazzling story that has been compared to the illusions of M. C. Escher and Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Using a true story of an Australian literary hoax as its starting point and deftly weaving in and out of timelines and plotlines, Carey’s ingenious, sparkling, and masterful touch never falters.

MY LIFE AS A FAKE, by Peter Carey (Vintage, 2005)

OUR HISTORY

This handsome project of the New Haven Preservation Trust offers a healthy dose of history and lively reading at the same time. An old port city, New Haven still bears the traces of many industries. Sixteen sites on or near the harbor, such as the Quinnipiac Brewery and the Strouse, Adler corset company (makers of the Smoothie foundation garment and heirs to the whalebone industry), are traced through maps, illustrations, photographs, and historical documents that reflect the changing face of New England.

CARRIAGES AND CLOCKS, CORSETS AND LOCKS: THE RISE AND FALL OF AN INDUSTRIAL CITY— NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT, edited by Preston Maynard and Marjorie Noyes (University Press of New England, 2005)

Novelist Morante was uniquely qualified to write about how “history obscures individual lives” (Library Journal): She and her husband, Alberto Moravia, spent a year in hiding during World War II. Nearly 30 years later, the indelible impressions of man’s inhumanity took shape in the story of schoolteacher Ida Mancuso. As she raises her infant, the product of rape by a German soldier, along with her teenage son, the tender intimacies of motherhood are buffeted in the hard realities of war, poverty, and the struggle for existence. Afred Kazan described History in Esquire as “one of the few novels in any language that renders the full horror of Hitler’s war, the war that never gets into the books. . . .”

HISTORY: A NOVEL, by Elsa Morante, translated from the Italian by William Weaver (1974; Steerforth, 2000)

QUIPS AND QUOTES

From Nikita Khrushchev’s “We must abolish the cult of the individual, once and for all” to Robespierre’s “I am myself the people,” Abigail Adams’s “. . . Remember all men would be tyrants if they could,” and Roman poet and dramatist Lucius Accius’ “Let them hate, so long as they fear.” This huge, compulsively readable collection from the monsters we love to hate and the leaders we continue to emulate covers more than 2,000 years of recorded history.

THE OXFORD DICTIONARY OF POLITICAL QUOTES, edited by Antony Jay (Oxford University Press, 2006)

LOVE STORIES

In Tyler’s 17th novel, two couples who have adopted Korean babies, the assimilated Iranian-American Yazdans and the unselfconsciously American Donaldsons, meet in the Baltimore airport and become friends. At the center of the multicultural story is a surprising (to those involved) love that blooms between Sami Yazdan’s mother and Bitsy Donaldson’s father. As always, Tyler (whose late husband was Iranian) has a light and affectionate touch and a graceful wisdom, and her characters are unique yet recognizable.

DIGGING TO AMERICA, by Anne Tyler (Knopf, 2006)