Book Rec of the Day 11/7-11/14/2008

POETRY

For the Puritans who crossed the Atlantic in 1630, the New World often brought illness, death, bitter cold, and starvation. Yet, among the survivors, Anne Bradstreet kept alive a spark of poetry, along with a significant piece of early-American history. Daughter of first deputy governor Thomas Dudley and wife of future governor Simon Bradstreet, Anne was not only the first American poet but also a bestselling one, mother of eight, loving wife, model citizen, and independent thinker.

MISTRESS BRADSTREET: THE UNTOLD LIFE OF AMERICA’S FIRST POET, by Charlotte Gordon (Little, Brown, 2005)

GOTHIC FICTION

Egan’s latest novel displays her gift for sly parody and quick-change narration. The novel is purportedly written by Ray, a prison inmate. In gleefully dopey, druggy lingo, he plunges us into a noir-gothic tale of two cousins reunited after 20 years to restore an old European castle for travelers. Meanwhile, Ray’s own story also picks up and begins to take shape. Haunting yet playful, this multitasking novel by “a refreshingly unclassifiable novelist” (Madison Smartt Bell, The New York Times Book Review) will keep you on your toes.

THE KEEP, by Jennifer Egan (Knopf, 2006)

ITALIAN STYLE

“Laugh-out-loud funny.”—International Herald Tribune

Italian journalist Severgnini turns his witty, gently chiding eye to his own country after well-received looks at England and America (Ciao, America! An Italian Discovers the U.S.). It’s a light read, focusing on food, sex, television, and everyday interactions at the grocery, home, and job site, honed by his knowledge that these are the ways local cultures express themselves in spite of the erosions of globalization.

LA BELLA FIGURA: A FIELD GUIDE TO THE ITALIAN MIND, by Beppe Severgnini (Broadway, 2006)

CRITICS RAVE
“A small masterpiece, a compact, strange work of Chekhovian grace, grief, wit and compassion.”—The Washington Post

An anonymous woman turns up in the morgue and no one claims her. When a newspaper threatens to expose the inhumanity of the corporation where she worked as a janitor in letting her die so humbly, a human-resources worker is assigned to trace her roots, which he does, allowing her remarkable life to become intertwined with his own. Yehoshua is an Israeli novelist who summons, among aficionados, murmurs of Nobel status.

A WOMAN IN JERUSALEM, by A. B. Yehoshua; translated from the Hebrew by Hillel Halkin (Harcourt, 2006)

OUR TIMES

Nancy Altman, a pension rights advocate and expert on Social Security, provides a very readable, cogent, and balanced analysis of the history and workings of our social security system, from its beginning with FDR (the only man Prescott Bush, Dubya’s grandfather, “truly hated”) to its attempted undoing by George W. Bush. Read this for the background and to arm yourself for the battle which undoubtedly is not yet over.

THE BATTLE FOR SOCIAL SECURITY: FROM FDR’S VISION TO BUSH’S GAMBLE, by Nancy J. Altman (Wiley, 2005)

THRILLER FICTION

Camille Preaker, who is a cub reporter in Chicago, is sent back to her Missouri hometown to investigate two women’s grisly murders. She is also a woman with sad secrets of her own, and the scars of many self-inflicted childhood cuts to prove it. This relentlessly tension-building, stylish, dark thriller, which won admiring reviews from masters such as Stephen King, shows that you can go home again, but you probably shouldn’t.

SHARP OBJECTS: A NOVEL, by Gillian Flynn (Shaye Areheart Books, 2006)

A WHALE OF A STORY

While training for a long-distance swim in cold California waters in the early morning, Lynne Cox feels something swimming beneath her. It turns out to be an 18-foot baby gray whale. Though tired, Cox knows that if she goes in to shore, the whale, separated from its mother, will follow her and die stranded on the beach. Hour after hour she swims with her new friend Grayson to find his mother, as poetic observations of the icy, inky sea and its patterns and movements and strange denizens alternate with fear, exhilaration, and determination.

GRAYSON, by Lynne Cox (Knopf, 2006)

PRIZE WINNER
Is it a murder mystery? A noir thriller? A stylistic tour de force? Yes! Jonathan Lethem has created an unforgettable character in loyal, sweet-natured, Tourette’s-afflicted Lionel Essrog. This sometimes hilarious and always absurd story takes us in and around Brooklyn and into the unfamiliar point of view of a man with Tourette’s syndrome. The result is a little like The Sopranos: surprisingly lyrical, complexly masculine, and toughly tender. Lethem received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Motherless Brooklyn.

MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN, by Jonathan Lethem (Vintage, 2000)