Book Rec of the Day 5/22-6/2/2010

PEN/FAULKNER FINALIST

A sweeping saga and love story of the exodus to Oregon in 1847. Author Karen Fisher found the journals of a forebear, 11-year-old Emma. Through Emma’s eyes we learn of her mother, Lucy, widowed and remarried, the husband who forces his family away from Iowa, and the bigger-than-life Scotsman who helps them and dazzles Lucy as they launch themselves into unknown territory.

A SUDDEN COUNTRY, by Karen Fisher (Random House, 2006)

WHASSUP WITH THE RECORD BUSINESS?

McSweeney’s contributor Dan Kennedy, an ardent rock fan since his childhood in the ’70s, landed a job in marketing at Atlantic Records. He hung on for 18 months in “a modern-day ivory tower of mogul monsters” but was dismissed when the company was taken over. This is his power-ballad memoir of that time, and it’s rock ’n’ roll funny. There are confused run-ins with music stars, scathing observations of corporate life, and executives’ disconnect with the music they are trying to sell. Dig the helpful lists, such as “Inappropriate Greetings and Salutations for Middle-Aged White Record Executives to Exchange: #1. Hello, Dawg.”

ROCK ON: AN OFFICE POWER BALLAD, by Dan Kennedy (Algonquin Books, 2008)

TWO FROM SUE

Sue Miller has not been idle since 1986, when she burst onto the scene with the tragic and beautiful The Good Mother. In Lost in the Forest, set among the California vineyards, a man falls in love with his ex-wife after her second husband dies, and the family quilt must stitch itself together again. In The Senator’s Wife, two couples (one a retired U.S. senator and his wife) occupy a duplex in New England. As the two women begin to cross paths more often, they spin a complex spiderweb of events.

LOST IN THE FOREST, by Sue Miller (Ballantine Books, 2006)

THE SENATOR’S WIFE, (Knopf, 2008)

DEAR NANCY, DEBORAH, DIANA, AND UNITY

One of five famous sisters (see Nancy in tomorrow’s entry), Jessica Mitford, author of The American Way of Death, among many other titles, engaged in extensive correspondence. Besides keeping in touch with her sisters, she wrote to personages from Winston Churchill to Katharine Graham to Hillary Rodham Clinton on a wide range of subjects including fascism, communism and its adherents (she was one, after all), fat farms, and writing programs, all with warmth, humor, and singular wit.

DECCA: THE LETTERS OF JESSICA MITFORD, by Jessica Mitford and Peter Y. Sussman (Knopf, 2006)

TIMELESS CLASSICS

For anyone who knows only BBC or movie adaptations of Nancy Mitford’s masterpieces from the 1940s, or who read them long ago—run, do not walk, to the nearest bookstore, library, or online purveyor, and sink into some of the best writing this side of Jane Austen. The Radlett family, as seen through the eyes of the less glamorous but beloved adopted niece-sister, Fanny, is a unique and unforgettable creation; the prose cuts like a diamond.

THE PURSUIT OF LOVE

LOVE IN A COLD CLIMATE, by Nancy Mitford (Vintage, 2001)

POLYGAMY

Carolyn Jessop was born into the Fundamentalist Church of the Latter-Day Saints. At age 18 she was forced to wed a 50-year-old man who already had three wives and would go on to marry more. Escape is her story of life in the cult, how she fled with her eight children, and the way she finally freed herself of a disgraceful kind of bondage that continues to exist in 21st-century America. A fascinating, horrifying book.

ESCAPE, by Carolyn Jessop and Laura Palmer (Broadway Books, 2007)

ON THE FACTORY FLOOR WITH BETTE AND JOAN

When romance meets business, what do you get? The movie studio system. Back in the bad old days of Hollywood, Warner Bros. and MGM manufactured products such as Tyrone Power and Lana Turner and sold them to the American public. Jeanine Basinger, chair of film studies at Wesleyan University, gives us a nostalgic and entertaining account of how it all worked.

THE STAR MACHINE, by Jeanine Basinger (Knopf, 2007)

“THE LAST FULL MEASURE OF DEVOTION”

Memorial Day was first officially observed in 1868 to honor the Civil War dead. It’s no wonder. The first modern war brought carnage beyond anything the nation had ever known. Drew Gilpin Faust shows how slaughter on such a scale changed Americans’ views of war and death in practical as well as profound ways—where and how do you bury so many men? The Washington Post says, “A powerful corrective to all the romantic claptrap that still envelops a war that took as many American lives, 620,000, as all other wars from the Revolution to Korea combined.”

THIS REPUBLIC OF SUFFERING: DEATH AND THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR, by Drew Gilpin Faust (Knopf, 2008)

IN DARKEST DUBLIN

“It was not the dead that seemed to Quirke uncanny but the living. When he walked into the morgue long after midnight and saw Malachy Griffin there, he felt a shiver along his spine that was to prove prophetic, a tremor of troubles to come.” Christine Falls is set in a brooding, dark, and foggy 1950s Dublin evoked in the elegant, lyrical prose of Benjamin Black (otherwise known as the prizewinning literary novelist John Banville). As beautifully plotted and suspenseful a noir mystery as you are likely to come across this year.

CHRISTINE FALLS, by Benjamin Black (Henry Holt, 2007)

TREND SPOTTER

This book, winner of Washington Monthly’s Political Book Award and named one of Harvard Business Review’s 20 annual Breakthrough Ideas, traces a trend that the author has studied for some time—the rise of a creative class, as he calls it. Richard Florida elucidates how it shows in work, play, clothing, approach to ideas, synthesis of information, economy, everything we do, as well as how we can use our behaviors to better advantage for society.

THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS: AND HOW IT’S TRANSFORMING WORK, LEISURE, COMMUNITY, AND EVERYDAY LIFE, by Richard Florida (Basic Books, 2002)