Book Rec of the Day 9/25-10/5/2008

WORKING LATE

Edward Said, best known for his study of the West’s perception of the Middle East, was also a music critic and professor of literature. In a class at Columbia University, “Late Works/Late Style,” he explored the nature of artists’ late work. The challenging book that grew out of the class examines the work of musicians and writers such as Beethoven, Jean Genet, and Thomas Mann in their later years. Said argues that as artists approach death, their work may “crown a lifetime of aesthetic endeavor” but can often develop as works of “intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction.” It’s a fascinating look at the late work of great artists by a brilliant intellect.

ON LATE STYLE: MUSIC AND LITERATURE AGAINST THE GRAIN, by Edward Said (Pantheon, 2006)

FRUSTRATED POET

Father Urrutia Lacroix lies on his deathbed, recalling his life in one long, all-through-the-night confession. He had wanted to be a poet, but instead he became a Jesuit priest, literary critic, and a lackey of Chile’s ruling class. By Night in Chile is the first of Bolaño’s books to be translated into English. This story of morality and politics has been hailed as “one of the great Latin American novels” in Kirkus Reviews.

BY NIGHT IN CHILE, by Roberto Bolaño; translated by Chris Andrews (New Directions, 2003)

“An astonishing, beautiful, deeply intelligent record of an extraordinary life.”—Toni Morrison, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature

John Hope Franklin studied at Harvard and taught in America’s most prestigious schools. He served on presidential committees. He wrote the seminal work on African-American history, From Slavery to Freedom. He was threatened by a lynch mob while doing research on black cotton farmers in Mississippi during the Depression. A great deal of doing and observing and thinking went into making a very full life, and this is the book Franklin wrote about it.

MIRROR TO AMERICA: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN, by John Hope Franklin (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005)

ROMANTIC FICTION

The Pilot’s Wife opens with a knock at the door at 3:00 in the morning, when Kathryn Lyons learns that her husband, Jack, has died in a plane crash. But who was the man she had loved? Following rumors of Jack’s secret life, as well as her heart, Kathryn bravely reaches into the depths of love, memory, loss, and betrayal to grasp at the truth. Shreve delivers a seamless, sensual page-turner.

THE PILOT’S WIFE, by Anita Shreve (Little, Brown, 1998)

ARTIST BIO

In the first volume of Spurling’s epic biography, The Unknown Matisse, the painter struggled to establish himself. Here, at age 40, he is “the master.” Using primary documents, mostly letters, Spurling gives us Matisse the man, not just the painter. Outwardly conventional, cushioned in what we would now call a suburban lifestyle, while many of his contemporaries were barely eking out an existence, he was never comfortable with his success. Spurling’s command of her subject is impressive, always with an eye to the intersections of the artistic life and the personal.

MATISSE THE MASTER: A LIFE OF HENRI MATISSE: THE CONQUEST OF COLOUR: 1909-1954, by Hilary Spurling (Knopf, 2005)

PHOTOGRAPHY

The great photographer Robert Capa (1913-54) is represented here in a stunning collection of 937 photographs selected by his brother Cornell, himself a noted Life photographer, and his biographer, Richard Whelan. From the famous war images (the Allied landing on Omaha Beach; the Loyalist soldier in the Spanish Civil War caught at the moment of a bullet’s fatal impact) to celebrities and artists at work and at play, this handsome volume is an inspiring testament to Capa’s eye and heart.

ROBERT CAPA: THE DEFINITIVE COLLECTION, edited by Richard Whelan and Cornell Capa (Phaidon Press, 2001)

“All the Sherlock Holmes stories with the most learned, interesting, revelatory annotations possible. . . . An indispensable set.”—Peter Straub

These three hefty volumes are handsome and exhaustive, filled with notes and illustrations illuminating in almost superhuman detail the life and times of the great detective and his friend Dr. Watson. They are great resources for those coming to the stories for the first time, as well as seasoned Baker Street Irregulars.

	THE NEW ANNOTATED SHERLOCK HOLMES: THE COMPLETE SHORT STORIES, VOLS. I & II, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; edited by Leslie S. Klinger (W. W. Norton, 2004)
	THE NEW ANNOTATED SHERLOCK HOLMES: THE NOVELS, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; edited by Leslie S. Klinger (W. W. Norton, 2005)

EMERALD ISLE

The final volume of The Dublin Saga, The Rebels of Ireland picks up where The Princes of Ireland left off: with Ireland under the heel of the English in the 16th century. The epic colorfully tramps from one generation to the next through Ireland’s bloody history until the rise of Parnell and finally the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922. Rutherford fills the book with enough intrigue and romance to keep a person reading late many nights running.

THE REBELS OF IRELAND: THE DUBLIN SAGA, by Edward Rutherford (Doubleday, 2006)

THE BAND PLAYED ON

The 33⅓ series comprises small books about significant rock albums, written with a contagious enthusiasm by writers who love the music. John Niven casts his entry in the form of a novella in which he blends fact and fiction to convey the high life of drugs, sex, and rock and roll that went into one of the most famous rock albums (Music from Big Pink, by The Band), to come out of that most famous time (July 1968).

THE BAND’S MUSIC FROM BIG PINK: A NOVELLA, by John Niven (Continuum International, 2005)

“Really comic, really tragic, bracingly unsentimental . . . What a triumph! What joy!”—The Boston Sunday Globe

Atkinson’s first novel is the funny and poignant story of Ruby Lennox and her difficult, dysfunctional family. It’s a bumpy ride with a philandering father and an unhappy mother, Bunty. Ruby also has two older sisters, one headstrong and one depressed. And there are the previous generations who are splendidly taken up in footnotes at the end of the chapters.

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE MUSEUM, by Kate Atkinson (Picador USA, 1999)

“I’m still a bit puzzled as to why no one has come forward to make me look like thirty cents. But except for an occasional tour-de-force like The Big Clock, no one has.”—Raymond Chandler

George Stroud, editor of Crimeways magazine, knows that his boss, Earl Janoth, the CEO of the media empire that owns Crimeways, is responsible for the murder of a woman Stroud has been seeing. The woman was Janoth’s girlfriend, and Janoth knows somebody saw him leaving her place on the night of her murder. But he doesn’t know who it was. He picks Stroud to lead an investigation to find out the identity of the man whom we know to be Stroud himself.

THE BIG CLOCK, by Kenneth Fearing (1948; New York Review of Books Classics, 2006)