Book Rec of the Day 10/20-10/31/2008

HISTORY REVISITED

Mann, a contributor to Atlantic Monthly and Science, marshals an array of evidence and documentation to paint a vivid picture of the “New World” before Columbus and Pizarro, and it’s quite different from what you learned in school. The indigenous populations were highly civilized, organized, and sophisticated. The Inca had metallurgical skills and weapons; the Maya had a well-developed political system. With 56 black-and-white photos and 15 maps.

1491: NEW REVELATIONS OF THE AMERICAS BEFORE COLUMBUS, by Charles C. Mann (Vintage, 2006)

Pnin is the antidote if you have found Nabokov too difficult, too literary, or too serious or have not yet read him, perhaps fearing he might be too something. In Pnin, our unheroic hero is a Russian émigré and professor of English literature at an American university. As the gentle soul bumbles from unremunerative lecture to unsympathetic landlady to insensitive librarian, we can only wonder why Nabokov lavishes such rich comic prose on the rotund, terribly shy, repressed character. Was it necessary to go to so much trouble just to break our hearts?

PNIN, by Vladimir Nabokov (1957; Everyman’s Library, 2004)

HERSTORY

Mad King George III of England (1760-1820) and Queen Charlotte had 15 children, six of them girls. While the six surviving sons led active (or overactive) adult lives as privileged spendthrifts and roués, the daughters were cloistered and exposed to the twisted domestic life of the royal family, which was increasingly tainted by the king’s insanity and the resultant political turmoil. With intimate detail drawn largely from the letters of the queen and princesses, Fraser paints an engrossing group portrait of these talented women who were driven to “subversive behavior and even acts of desperation.”

PRINCESSES: THE SIX DAUGHTERS OF GEORGE III, by Flora Fraser (Anchor, 2006)

READ ME

Historian William Hickling Prescott and his biographer, George Ticknor, were real figures in 19th-century Boston, but Sheila Heti uses them only as the basis for a wonderful novelistic treatment of the relationship between a fawning, jealous biographer and his Olympian, successful subject. Why does destiny reward some and punish others? The answer is hidden somewhere in the ways of the world and in the myriad choices we make.

TICKNOR: A NOVEL, by Sheila Heti (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006)

SHORT FICTION

Yes, he’s the son of Stephen King, but he’s also a powerfully talented new author in his own right. Set mostly in Maine, often with a gory or macabre twist, this collection shows a poignant heart, warmth, and bittersweet humanity that do not rely on the supernatural but on the rich, earthy soil of moral choices, guilt, love, and hate. The title novella deals with a son and his single mother, who is about to remarry, and the son’s attempt to sabotage her (and his own) happiness.

WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER: A NOVELLA AND STORIES, by Owen King (Bloomsbury USA, 2005)

ST. CRISPIN’S DAY

“[A] thoroughly engrossing study of Henry and the battle that made him.”—William Grimes, The New York Times

Though the Shakespeare version of Henry V is marvelous, we learn from Barker once again that he was a poet rather than a historian. She addresses Henry’s strategy and the events that led to the battle, as well as its ramifications for France and England afterward. But at the center is, of course, St. Crispin’s Day, the flower of French chivalry, and the power and reach of the Welsh longbow.

AGINCOURT: HENRY V AND THE BATTLE THAT MADE ENGLAND, by Juliet Barker (Little, Brown, 2006)

FOODIE MEMOIR

Longtime New York magazine food writer and novelist Gael Greene, known as the “Insatiable Critic,” offers her juicy, ripe life (and some good recipes) upon a platter in this memoir. Coming of age in the 1960s, the world was her oyster, along with many, many famous lovers, friends, and mentors. She knows how to tell a story, and she has more than enough material. Not for prudes or ascetics, but for the rest of us, a feast of fun.

INSATIABLE: TALES FROM A LIFE OF DELICIOUS EXCESS, by Gael Greene (Warner Books, 2006)

On October 27, 2004, the Boston Red Sox won the World Series for the first time in 86 years—one of the biggest baseball stories in the history of the game. The next year the Red Sox gave Seth Mnookin unprecedented access to the team, both management and players. He investigated every nook and cranny of Fenway Park, every deal concluded, every decision made, and every player’s drama. The result is an exhaustive account of the re-creation of the Red Sox and a fascinating must read for every citizen of Red Sox nation.

FEEDING THE MONSTER: HOW MONEY, SMARTS, AND NERVE TOOK A TEAM TO THE TOP, by Seth Mnookin (Simon & Schuster, 2006)

Much has been written of Israel’s King David, the giant-killer and psalmist, lover of Bathsheba, father of Solomon and Absalom. But Robert Pinsky, former poet laureate of the United States, gives us a unique perspective on the poetry of David’s life and how it has enlivened our civilization over the last 3,000 years, capturing the historical David as he might have lived in triumph and anguish in those ancient days. Pinsky writes: “David’s drama is that of a life entire.”

THE LIFE OF DAVID, by Robert Pinsky (Schocken, 2005)

SLEEPING BEAUTY

“The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin,” the journalist narrator begins. But instead of a wild night, the nonagenarian merely contemplates the sleeping form of the girl and falls in love for the first time in his life. In his New Yorker review, John Updike wrote: “Márquez . . . has composed, with his usual sensual gravity and Olympian humor, a love letter to the dying light.”

MEMORIES OF MY MELANCHOLY WHORES, by Gabriel García Márquez; translated by Edith Grossman (Knopf, 2005)

TRAVEL

You may think the subtitle says it all, and you may have taken cross-country road trips before, but if you haven’t taken a ride with Robert Sullivan (compulsively readable author of Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants), you should try it.

CROSS COUNTRY: FIFTEEN YEARS AND 90,000 MILES ON THE ROADS AND INTERSTATES OF AMERICA WITH LEWIS AND CLARK, A LOT OF BAD MOTELS, A MOVING VAN, EMILY POST, JACK KEROUAC, MY WIFE, MY MOTHER-IN-LAW, TWO KIDS, AND ENOUGH COFFEE TO KILL AN ELEPHANT, by Robert Sullivan (Bloomsbury USA, 2006)

FAVORITE SERIES

If you can’t get enough Nora Roberts, you’re in luck, because the bestselling author shows no signs of slowing down. In Morrigan’s Cross, the first volume of the Circle Trilogy, Roberts forays into paranormal territory, set in 12th-century Ireland. Sorcerer Hoyt Mac Cionaoith is waging an epic battle with Lilith, a vampire who has turned Hoyt’s twin brother, Cian, into one of her kind. On Hoyt’s side are the goddess Morrigan and the five others—“the witch, the warrior, the scholar, the one of many forms, and the one you’ve lost”—he must gather as a “circle of six” in order to vanquish Lilith.

MORRIGAN’S CROSS (CIRCLE TRILOGY), by Nora Roberts (Jove, 2006)