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Wednesday, June 30, 2010

"The Nobodies Album," "The Last Empty Places," more


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Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Thursday July 1, 2010
THE NOBODIES ALBUM
Carolyn Parkhurst
Doubleday
ISBN 978 0 385 52769 9
313 pages
$25.95

Reviewed by Art Taylor
A number of ambitious and winning novels have been written about novelists themselves, from Margaret Atwood's "The Blind Assassin" to Ian McEwan's "Atonement" and Carol Shields' "Unless." Add to the list now D.C. author Carolyn Parkhurst's "The Nobodies Album." Not just a book about a novelist in action, it's also a meditation on writing itself and on the curious intersections between the imagined world and the real one.
Octavia Frost, the narrator here, has published several successful novels with a wide range of plots, among them: an abusive marriage viewed from an infant's perspective; an animator glimpsing hidden, unintended images in his own cartoons; and a 16th-century healer accused of witchcraft for trying to save her son. For her next book, she has embarked on a radical project: rewriting the endings to each of her previous novels. "I could see the traces of the hundred different stories I'd rejected," Octavia says. "It was all butterfly wings and tornadoes: even a slight deviation in any one of those places would be enough to set the whole book on course for a different outcome."
"The Nobodies Album" presents each of these final chapters and revisions -- a brilliant assortment -- but they're not the main story. Octavia wants to revise and set aright not just her books but her own past, too. She lost her husband and daughter in an accident many years earlier, and bringing up the surviving child, Milo, proved a turbulent journey. Four years ago, Milo discovered their family's history embedded in one of his mother's novels, which angered him so much that he hasn't spoken to her since. But now, en route to delivering her new manuscript, Octavia learns that her son, a famous rock musician, has been charged with murdering his girlfriend, and so off she goes to San Francisco, determined to protect her child. She also hopes that this crisis will prompt a reconciliation and that her writerly attention to detail can help uncover his innocence. Solving the murder, after all, just means constructing the right narrative around that blood-stained bed.
"The Nobodies Album" is brisk and engaging, though ultimately it features very little in the way of conventional clues or suspense. But the book succeeds in probing nuanced issues of guilt and innocence through an intricate collage of memories and musings, with excerpts from Octavia's novels and passages from Milo's lyrics. Milo's band is Pareidolia, defined here as "the human tendency to find meaning where there is none," but Octavia is more optimistic about purpose and meaning and about answering some emotionally richer questions. How should you raise a child? How do you deal with grief? What if you make a mistake? Or many? Is redemption elusive?
Those are some real mysteries, well worth grappling with.
Taylor reviews mysteries and thrillers for The Washington Post and other publications. His own fiction appears regularly in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.

Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group

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YOUNG ADULT NOVELS. Best-selling authors try books for the younger set
NA
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ISBN NA
NA pages
$NA

Reviewed by Mary Quattlebaum
Candace Bushnell not only crosses over to young adult fiction but travels back to the early 1980s in "The Carrie Diaries" (Balzar (plus sign) Bray, $18.99; ages 14 and up. ISBN 978-0061728914) to chronicle the senior year of Connecticut small-town girl Carrie Bradshaw. Yes, that Carrie Bradshaw, of Bushnell's best-selling "Sex and the City." In this YA prequel, Carrie finds her life complicated by a heart-thrumming bad boy, a fickle friend and her own newspaper column, but these developments leave her ready to embrace the Manhattan of Bushnell's adult books. Teens and adults looking for a light summer read will enjoy Carrie's witty reflections on high school and "The Big Love."
Mega-seller John Grisham swelled the ranks of crossover writers last month with his first middle-grade novel, "Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer" (Dutton, $16.99; ages 8-12. ISBN 978-0525423843). The only child of two attorneys, Theo, 13, loves courtrooms, "where lawyers battled like gladiators and judges ruled like kings." Unfortunately, a belabored story setup and melodramatic whodunit mar this effort. Even young readers curious about legal matters may be put off by Theo's priggish tendency to advise peers and teachers rather than converse in a friendlier style.
A more auspicious debut is "How I, Nicky Flynn, Finally Get a Life (and a Dog)" (Amulet, $16.95; ages 8-12. ISBN 978-0810982987), in which the title character's slightly sarcastic voice rings tween-true. Angry about his parents' divorce, Nicky, 11, turns for comfort to the shelter dog brought home by his overwhelmed mom. But why is the highly trained Reggie so fearful? Tracking down the dog's previous owner leads to offbeat characters, lies and danger. Art Corriveau follows up a first novel for adults with this fine, fresh mystery that is believable as a kid's experience.
Nuanced characterizations and lyrical writing distinguish Beth Kephart's oeuvre, including this third YA novel, "The Heart Is Not a Size" (HarperTeen, $16.99; ages 12 and up. ISBN 978-0061470486). Reliable Georgia and her artistic friend Riley volunteer through a GoodWorks building project to help a Mexican village. Being away from their privileged American homes, though, brings out secret issues: Georgia's panic attacks and Riley's eating disorder. How Georgia learns to help herself and Riley goes to the heart of this sensitive exploration of self-acceptance, friendship and teen-galvanized social change.
Rick Riordan catapulted from Edgar-winning detective fiction to international renown with his tween series "Percy Jackson and the Olympians." His new series, "The Kane Chronicles," swaps the bickering, boisterous Greek pantheon for the equally intriguing gods of ancient Egypt. "The Red Pyramid" (Disney Hyperion, $17.99; ages 9-12. ISBN 978-1423113386) begins with a literal bang in the British Museum. Kane siblings Carter, 14, and Sadie, 12, watch in horror as explosive forces imprison their Egyptologist father in a golden coffin. The two are soon on the run from London to Cairo to Washington, D.C., trying to piece together clues to aid Dad's rescue. The pace never flags as the narrative cuts between cautious Carter and intrepid Sadie. Riordan knows what kids like and delivers it well, including action-packed scenes involving a key obelisk, the Washington Monument.
Mary Quattlebaum is a children's author and writing teacher.

Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group

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THE LAST EMPTY PLACES: A Past and Present Journey Through the Blank Spots on the American Map
Peter Stark
Ballantine
ISBN 978-0-345-49537-2
352 pages
$26

Reviewed by Tahir Shah
As a travel writer, I have spent years crisscrossing the globe in search of the fabulous, the rare and the exotic. Mine has been a lifelong quest for the bizarre, and my rule of thumb has been "If it ain't crazy as hell, leave it out." But time and travel are great levelers. Hack through a few jungles, stagger across three or four deserts, climb some mountains, sleep in yurts and tents and at least one wretched west African brothel, and you begin to crave something else. Something new. It's a deep-down craving, the kind pregnant women get when they feel they have to chew on dirt. It's almost primeval ... the craving for the ordinary. It's a desire that is satisfied by Peter Stark's new book, "The Last Empty Places."
Stark is a writer and a journalist who grew up in an old log cabin in the Wisconsin woods. After 40 years of traveling the world and writing about what he has seen, it seems right and proper that he turn his attention to his homeland. From the start of his book, there's a sense that it's about coming home, Stark reacquainting himself with a blissful childhood, while somehow pitting himself against urban sprawl and the claustrophobic suffocation of the virtual world. He practices gentle observation the low-tech way.
Yet the book does begin with some high-tech thinking. Taking advice from a friend, Stark got himself a copy of the "Nighttime Map of the United States," a satellite shot showing population densities by electric lights across the country. Cross-referencing this with his Rand McNally road map, he plotted key target zones, areas of emptiness that somehow sang out to him. Uninterested in national parks (or in Alaska), Stark was more concerned with the realm of the pioneers, the American naturalists and thinkers who influenced his life: men like Thoreau, Emerson and that Scottish-born champion of the wilderness, John Muir. Over the next two-and-a-half years, Stark roamed and roamed, lured by the blank gaps in northern Maine and western Pennsylvania, in southeastern Oregon and the New Mexican desert.
To someone who grew up largely in Europe -- which is full to the point of bursting with people, towns and cities -- there's something deliciously refreshing about rambling through the United States in search of emptiness. I often find myself imagining that it, too, will be somehow overloaded. But it isn't. The United States is a vast, mesmerizing canvas of nature, a land that in many ways is as untamed now as it was in the times of the pioneers. It's just a matter of going in search of it.
I must admit that, when I read that Stark was dragging his wife and two kids along, at least part of the way, I raised one eyebrow and then the other. "Sounds like a travel writer trying to sell us a family vacation," I said to myself. But after pushing my way through the prologue (oh, how I dislike prologues), I found myself in the warm, wonderful underbelly of Peter Stark's world. It's a realm of considerable erudition, one that's observed with a reporter's eye for detail -- a reporter of the old school, who knows never to waste a syllable, let alone a word. There's plenty of history, the kind that's nailed firmly to places and the people he encounters. There's delicious description, too, such as that of a tiny Oregon village called Fields, "It had that oasis look to it -- a distant, yellow-green island of cottonwood trees and a huge brownish valley rimmed by dry mountains."
But the most touching thing about this book is the way Stark detours us away from the world we've all been sold -- the shopping malls and the theme parks, the gridlock, the cities and the desperate homogeneity of it all. With irresistible charm he reminds us that America is still a wild and vibrant miscellany of nature, a one-of-a-kind place.
With time I can imagine "The Last Empty Places" becoming required reading in schools. And I hope it does. It's a book that the early American naturalists and the pioneers before them would be proud of, one that carves through the smoke screen of mass culture, reminding us of the true essence of America.
Tahir Shah is the author of "The Caliph's House" and "In Arabian Nights." He lives in Casablanca.

Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group

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ROLE MODELS
John Waters
Farrar Straus Giroux
ISBN 978-0-374-25147-5
301 pages
$25

Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley
It's just about impossible to believe, but John Waters, the ineffable Bad Boy of Baltimore - "The King of Puke," "the Pope of Trash," the "Cult Filmmaker" - is now 64 years old. The man who gave the world such memorable if occasionally barf-inducing films as "Hag in a Black Leather Jacket," "Mondo Trasho," "Pink Flamingos," "Polyester" and "Hairspray" will be pulling Social Security checks any day now, leaning back in his Barcalounger and reminiscing about the good old days when porn was really porn and dog poop was on the menu.
As evidence that Waters is in a nostalgic mood, we now have "Role Models," in which he pays tribute to various men and women who in one way or another helped him become the man he is. If that inspires you to murmur, "Thanks a lot but no thanks," well, you're entitled, but Waters is a greater National Treasure than 90 percent of the people who are given "Kennedy Center Honors" each December. Unlike those gray eminences of the show-business establishment, Waters doesn't kowtow to the received wisdom, he flips it the bird.
So it stands to reason that those whom he salutes as his role models are not your standard-issue Boy Scouts. A few of them are well known -- Johnny Mathis, Tennessee Williams, Little Richard -- while others are known only within the tight little circles in which they work their magic: the Japanese fashion designer Rei Kawakubo; Lady Zorro, "the lesbian stripper from Baltimore's notorious red light district The Block"; the "outsider pornographers" Bobby Garcia and David Hurles.
Some of these people you might like to ask over for drinks, others you might ... not. Johnny Mathis, of course, would be the perfect guest, and probably would take fizzy water instead of a gin Gibson. "I wish I were Johnny Mathis" is how this book begins. "So mainstream. So popular. So unironic, yet perfect. Effortlessly boyish at over seventy years old, with a voice that still makes all of America want to make out. ... A man whose 'Greatest Hits' album was on the Billboard charts for 490 consecutive weeks. Versus me, a cult filmmaker whose core audience, no matter how much I've crossed over, consists of minorities who can't even fit in with their own minorities."
Still, "Johnny Mathis understands a lot about me. I can tell. He's a gentleman who lives alone and he's from another era." But is he gay? Waters naturally wants to know, but when Waters interviews Mathis at his house in Los Angeles, he politely keeps his own counsel on the subject, as he always has, but he leaves an opening for a classic Waters riff:
"I've always been pretty up-front about my sexuality (even though Mink Stole today says she didn't even know I was gay for a long time), but I understand Hollywood royalty's reticence about revealing anything personal, hetero (BEG ITAL)or(END ITAL) homo. Gus Van Sant and I always joke about the press saying we are 'openly' gay. What's that supposed to mean? It sounds like we're arriving at a premiere shrieking, 'Hey, Mary! Got any Judy Garland records?'"
As that passage suggests, outrageousness, far more than sexuality, is at the core of Waters' persona. "Tennessee Williams was my childhood friend," he tells us elsewhere. "I yearned for a bad influence and Tennessee was one in the best sense of the word: joyous, alarming, sexually confusing, and dangerously funny. ... Tennessee never seemed to fit the gay stereotype even then, and sexual ambiguity and turmoil were always made appealing and exciting in his work. 'My type doesn't know who I am,' he stated according to legend, and even if the sex lives of his characters weren't always healthy, they certainly seemed hearty. Tennessee Williams wasn't a gay cliche, so I had the confidence to try to not be one myself. Gay was not enough."
No doubt you are beginning to understand that "Role Models" isn't half as much about these men and women Waters claims to value, even venerate, as it is about Waters himself. His chapter on Rei Kawakubo opens with this declaration: "Fashion is very important to me. My 'look' for the last twenty years or so has been 'disaster at the dry cleaners.' I shop in reverse. When I can afford to buy a new outfit, something has to be wrong with it. Purposely wrong." Enter "the genius fashion dictator" Rei Kawakubo, who "specializes in clothes that are torn, crooked, permanently wrinkled, ill-fitting, and expensive." Waters admires (and actually wears!) her over-the-top clothing (if "clothing" is the word for it) and has a weakness for her fragrance, Odeur 53, which "to me smells exactly like Off! insect repellent." Among its ingredients, according to Rei, are "the freshness of oxygen, wash drying in the wind, nail polish, burnt rubber and the mineral intensity of carbon," to which Waters responds: "That's exactly what I want to smell like! How did she know?"
To me it sounds as if Rei Kawakubo is as much a put-on artist as Waters himself, but what do I know about fashion? Speaking of which, there's Waters' trademark, his famous pencil-thin moustache, which he grew "in a misguided attempt to steal Little Richard's identity." There was a problem:
"It's tough for a white man who isn't that hairy to grow one. Sure, I shaved with a razor on top and trimmed the bottom with cuticle scissors, just like I do every day now, but it still looked kind of pitiful. Then 'Sick,' the friend of mine from the Provincetown tree fort who had moved to Santa Barbara and changed her nickname to 'Sique,' gave me some fashion advice when I was staying with her. 'Just use a little eyebrow pencil and it will work better,' she advised, and then showed me how. Presto! An 'iconic' look: a ridiculous fashion joke that I still wear forty years later. Surprised? Don't be! It (BEG ITAL)is(END ITAL) called a 'pencil moustache,' isn't it? And there's only (BEG ITAL)one(END ITAL) pencil that does the trick -- Maybelline Expert Eyes in Velvet Black. My entire identity depends on this magic little wand of sleaze."
Well. I could quote John Waters all day long. The time in 1957, when he was 11 years old and "shoplifted" a Little Richard record. He put it on the player at his grandmother's: "The antiques rattled. My parents looked stunned. In one magical moment, every fear of my white family had been laid bare: an uninvited, screaming, flamboyant black man was in the living room. Even Dr. Spock hadn't warned them about this." Or the time he visited the porn director Bobby Garcia: "As I pull up in a ridiculous Mercedes-Benz that I didn't order but was upgraded to by the car rental place, I feel a sickening sense of entitlement. I hate fancy cars. In real life I drive a plain Buick that looks like a narcotics-agent car or the vehicle of the local monsignor. Who wants to be noticed in his car? Suppose I still might want to commit a crime? Who would ever want a car a witness could describe?"
And so forth. Yes, every once in a while Waters turns serious, mainly in his chapter about Leslie Van Houten, the "Manson girl" who has been in prison for four decades for her involvement in those dreadful crimes and who now deserves to be paroled, as Waters correctly believes, but heartfelt though these moments are, the outrageous ones are echt Waters. He has the ability to show humanity at its most ridiculous and make that funny rather than repellent. To quote his linear ancestor W.C. Fields: It's a gift.
Jonathan Yardley can be reached at yardleyj(at symbol)washpost.com.

Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group

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Tuesday, June 29, 2010

"Holy Water" and "Between a Church and a Hard Place"


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Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Wednesday June 30, 2010
HOLY WATER
James P. Othmer
Doubleday
ISBN 978-0385525138
292 pages
$26.95

Reviewed by Elinor Lipman
The hero of James P. Othmer's second novel, "Holy Water," is -- luckily for us -- living a middle-management life that has added up only to "the conscientious fulfillment of limited expectations." At 32, Henry Tuhoe has a resume that traces his lateral moves and promotions from Oral Care to Non-headache-related Pain Relief to Laxatives to Silicon-based Sprays and Coatings and finally to vice president of the Underarm Division.
With the closing of "Armpits" -- one of the few places where the author's cleverness calls attention to itself -- corporate "rightsizing" coincides with the break-up of Henry's unhappy marriage to the unreasonable Rachel, who has forced him into a vasectomy. Or has she? This medical and marital mystery is where Henry first wins our sympathy and recruits us for his adventures. Not that he has a choice, but will his transfer be, as his boss characterizes it, "a chance to start over, an opportunity to lose his inherent wussiness"?
As with the author's acclaimed first novel, "The Futurist," "Holy Water" manages to be at the same time cynical and soul-searching, a difficult juggling act better served in some chapters than others. Henry must decide: Lose his job or be corporately exiled to the fictional third world Kingdom of Galado on the India-China border? There he will open a call center for Happy Mountain Springs bottled water, a sainted brand. Henry doesn't find out until he arrives that the citizens of the "unhinged monarchy" of Galado have no drinking water, that plastic bottles are outlawed, and that all the country's streams are toxic. But his corporate ennui turns into a personal humanitarian mission -- Clean water for all! -- fueled by love and eyes finally opened to the world outside himself. Alas, danger threatens and encroaches. "You have to know all the wrong people to get anything done in this country," he quickly learns.
His new home has a prince who is crazy to just the right megalomaniacal and comic degree. As a graduate of Northeastern, he speaks excellent English. Wearing Lycra workout tights while his iPod plays "High School Musical," he tells Henry, "I have decided to bypass governments and political diplomacy in favor of corporate diplomacy." As illiteracy, starvation and illness flourish, the prince dreams of office towers, banks, hotels, brand-name luxury boutiques and a 28-theater cineplex. His citizens, he asserts, despite demonstrations and uprisings to the contrary, do not want a democracy.
Though a layer of guy humor rests none too lightly on the first few chapters, we would miss larger-than-life Meredith, Henry's administrative assistant by day and an online nudist by night (her site, by subscription only: EEEEVA EEEENORMOUS and her 46EEEE Twins). Henry's secret voyeurism and respect for her multifold talents add a rewarding touchstone to the plot. No one-note porn star, the highly intelligent Meredith devours the National Review, the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal. Back at headquarters, via e-mail, strictly business, she helps Henry in his mission to supply fresh water to the parched and needy citizens of Galado.
The call center, despite daily training sessions, is never quite up and running: No employees speak English, and Henry is mightily distracted by the political realities of Galado, by his conscience and by Maya, a native and his second in command.
"You don't want to be here, do you?" she asks Henry on his first day. He replies sarcastically: "In a tiny village in the middle of nowhere teaching workers from a drought-plagued region how to talk about crystal-clear water that comes in a container that, incidentally, is forbidden here?"
In "The Futurist" Othmer demonstrated a terrific eye for the absurd, for deflating the big, the pompous, the entitled. Sly sentence by sly sentence, "Holy Water" similarly does not have a wasted word. Once he gets Henry out of Manhattan and into Galado, the author walks a perfect line between satire and compassion. Less satisfying are the ambitious plot turns, in which Henry's altruism goes a little action-adventure. There is a lane switch in the last few chapters, not just into darker comedy but into a more solemnly muckraking tone. Momentum doesn't offer an easy glide to the finish. As Maya tells Henry, "You use your humor and your cynicism to protect what is essentially smothered idealism." The same could be said for the hand that spins this often brilliant, always caustic corporate satire.
Is the marketplace asking authors to James-Bond-up their plots? Might some readers wish Henry had stayed in suburban New York, commuting to Manhattan, Cheever meets Vonnegut, having faith in the domestic over global ambitions? We look forward to that down-size. Othmer is a smart, elegant, witty writer who could do small beautifully.
Elinor Lipman's ninth novel, "The Family Man," is now in paperback.

Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group

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BETWEEN A CHURCH AND A HARD PLACE: One Faith-Free Dad's Struggle to Understand What It Means to Be Religious (or Not)
Andrew Park
Avery
ISBN 978-1-58333-371-6
210 pages
$26

Reviewed by Michelle Boorstein
Talk about a moment of truth. Andrew Park had a habit of avoiding the messy, conflicted aspects of his own religious identity (or lack of one) until his 3-year-old son began blurting out passionate comments about God -- picked up, apparently, at a church-run preschool. Park's response: to set off on a journey through his family history and contemporary American religion in hopes of learning how to communicate to his children what he sees as true and real. In essence, how to be a good dad.
But the problem is that he doesn't know what he believes. This confusion, which fuels his sweet memoir, "Between a Church and a Hard Place," will no doubt resonate with legions of parents (including this one). In his self-deprecating voice, Park makes an undeniable point: Having children makes you confront your ambivalences. After all, who wants to pass on squishy nothingness?
His wife and he had a plan to preface all comments to their kids about religion with "Well, some people believe ..." but his son's God talk called that plan into question. "He didn't care about 'some people.'" Park writes. "He wanted to know what we, his parents, believed." While Park isn't really a believer and says early in the book that he has a bias against religion, he makes little comments that suggest the opposite. He worries that his faith-free attitude is the result of laziness, describes his childhood in a secular home as "spiritual exile," and says that as someone unchurched he feels "alone."
Park's trip through his colorful family enlivens him. He explores his living relatives' rejection of his prominent great-grandfather, who was a leader in the Pentecostal Holiness movement in the late 1800s. He writes with a boy's-eye view of the time his older brother stunned the family by becoming born-again, prompting his parents to plot a secret retreat with a cult deprogrammer. Park always seems to have been on the sidelines, not sure where his sympathies lay.
Park puts on his journalist's hat to explore the sociological backdrop of periods in America when religion experienced growth and upheaval. He examines his own inconstant feelings and discovers he has pragmatic reasons to be drawn to faith, including the community it provides. He travels to the tabernacle named after his great-grandfather, interviews his late mother's friends about her faith, and tries to imagine his father's misery while trudging to church on Sundays as a child in Scotland.
Ultimately his investigations bring Park back where he started, but with new insight. He attends a seminar about how to raise ethical children without religion and seems to have found his own holy grail: It's OK to be a doubting dad. "I had forgotten what my job was," he writes, "I was responsible for helping them learn how to make it on their own." In the end, Park doesn't resolve one issue he raises repeatedly, which is that crises of life and death and morality can radically shift one's view on God. After reading the book, it's hard to know where Park's faith will lead.
Michelle Boorstein covers religion for The Washington Post. She can be reached at boorsteinm(at symbol)washpost.com.

Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group

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Monday, June 28, 2010

"Poop Happened," "The Invisible Bridge," more


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Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Tuesday June 29, 2010
MEMOIRS. Three books evoke the charms, and trials, of modern fatherhood.
NA
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ISBN NA
NA pages
$NA

Reviewed by Michael Lindgren
Ugly ties and superfluous power tools aren't the only things being wrapped up for Father's Day this year. In our post-feminist, recession-wracked era of unconditional love, flex time and gender-neutral diaper stations, the very definition of fatherhood itself is under constant revision. These three books are wildly different, but they share a warmth and emotional openness that would have been utterly foreign to men of my grandfather's generation.
Bruce Feiler's "The Council of Dads: My Daughters, My Illness, and the Men Who Could Be Me" (Morrow, $22.99) leads off the pack in sobering fashion. In 2008, Feiler, the indefatigable author of "Walking the Bible," received a diagnosis of a rare form of bone cancer, forcing him to confront every parent's nightmare: considering the life his two very young daughters would have without him. With this in mind, Feiler convened a "council of dads," six close friends whose cumulative presence would serve as a composite surrogate father to his girls. The men Feiler enlisted are a murderers' row of compassion and wisdom, exemplars of "a new kind of maleness" who "talk about things that were once the exclusive domain of women's magazines and daytime chat shows: our children, our feelings, even our bodies." Fortunately, Feiler's medical treatment -- which he documents in a series of harrowing journal entries -- has proved to be effective. There may be no need for the council, but Feiler's conversations with his potential stand-ins are candid and moving. "The Council of Dads" exemplifies the mysterious process by which bad news can alter our perspective and reorder our priorities, and it celebrates the ever-expanding level of emotional intimacy that men are increasingly free to engage.
Just because Donald N.S. Unger holds a Ph.D. and has "a stake in opening up the definition of family and of family roles," doesn't mean he's not ready to kick some ass. What jumps out from "Men CAN: The Changing Image and Reality of Fatherhood in America" (Temple, $25) is not its careful sociological analysis, but rather Unger's un-academic irritability when confronted with what he considers stifling stereotypes. "I'm not being a mother," he snarls, mid-diaper, at one feckless woman. "I'm being a parent." Semiotics aside, Unger is especially illuminating on the role of the media and other cultural forces in shaping our shared perceptions. For instance, he exposes as fundamentally reactionary and unhelpful all those "Doofus Dad" ads, in which inept men are parodied as "substantially incapable of doing work that they don't want to do anyway." The book is incisive and fair-minded, too, about the competing agendas that often surround parenthood. Unger notes that feminists, for example, may feel encroached upon by men's relatively recent arrival to the domestic sphere, but he concludes that to fall victim to infighting is to participate in a "circular firing squad." Although at times Unger gets lost in his pet analyses -- such as a long examination of the short-lived, now-forgotten sitcom "Kevin Hill" -- in general, "Men CAN" is succinct and persuasive.
Which is fine, except that sometimes even ill-tempered social scientists need to laugh. It's a relief, then, to turn to "No Wonder My Parents Drank: Tales From a Stand-Up Dad" (Simon & Schuster, $25). A title like that doesn't exactly raise high literary expectations, so it takes a while to realize that Jay Mohr is not as dumb as he looks. In his unsubtle way, he has sincere and perceptive things to say about the rewards of fatherhood. That said, on a certain level the only objective way to evaluate this kind of book is to meter how frequently it produces, by fair means and foul, audible laughter. Judged this way, "No Wonder My Parents Drank" is masterly, especially when Mohr does things like experiment with adult diapers. Poop jokes aside, Mohr is unabashed about his love for his son and the ways that being a parent has made him a better person. This, in a small, unlikely way, is remarkable. Mohr, after all, is a celebrity; he lives in Hollywood. Being a shallow, self-absorbed jerk is practically part of his job description, and yet here he is saying, "I am an 'I love you' type of guy. ... We are the first generation of 'I love you' dads." Like Bruce Feiler and Donald Unger and millions of other fathers, he's not afraid to value communication and empathy. That's good news for everybody.
Michael Lindgren is a writer and musician who lives in Manhattan.

Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group

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POOP HAPPENED!: A History of the World from the Bottom Up
Sarah Albee Illustrated by Robert Leighton
Walker
ISBN 978-0802720771
NA pages
$15.99

Reviewed by Abby McGanney Nolan
Full of scatological facts, jokey illustrations and groan-inducing puns ("The Origin of Feces," anyone?), this entertaining chronicle also sneaks in plenty of information about disease, science and communal living since hunters and gatherers decided to stop roaming and settle down. Discerning readers will be happily disgusted by sidebars about smelly castle moats and occupations that involved scavenging in sewers. And no one will miss the immense significance of clean water and decent plumbing.
In her chatty, informative style, Sarah Albee shows that civilization didn't evolve in a straight line. In medieval Europe, the ancient Roman plumbing system was thrown over in favor of filth and sanitary superstition. Insects combined with bad sewage systems to kill more people than wars did, and the habits of the upper classes were neither hygienic (King Louis XIV had two baths in his entire adult life) nor easy on servants (who had to handle all sorts of cleaning up). Albee has dug deep into the past (the book also features plenty of edifying archival photos and illustrations); but, in closing, she also touches on the future: new technology for toilets and diapers as well as the perils of accumulated waste. It's a dirty world, and someone's got to wade through it.
Abby McGanney Nolan frequently reviews for The Washington Post Book World.

Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group

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THE EXTRAORDINARY MARK TWAIN: (According to Susy)
Barbara Kerley. Illustrated by Edwin Fotheringham
Scholastic
ISBN 978-0545125086
NA pages
$17.99; ages 9 - 12

Reviewed by Abby McGanney Nolan
Mark Twain, one of the fathers of American literature, was also parent to one Susy Clemens, who decided at age 13 to fix the popular impression of her father. People "think of Mark Twain as a humorist, joking at everything. ... I never saw a man with so much variety of feeling as Papa has." Within this inspired picture book are passages from Susy's biography (sewn into the seam as mini books), which she began in secret before gaining full cooperation from her subject.
Barbara Kerley and Edwin Fotheringham have collaborated before on a book about a spirited daughter ("What to Do About Alice?"), but even Alice Roosevelt would take a back seat to Mark Twain. Kerley nicely sets up Susy's biography with her text, and Fotheringham's illustrations bring both father and daughter to life (even when young Samuel Clemens is shown pretending "to be dying so as not to have to go to school").
In one of the book's many handsome spreads, Fotheringham presents the Twain's Victorian Gothic residence as a huge dollhouse open to view. Susy's observations about her father -- how he conferred with their cats, how he paced and speechified at dinner, and how he threw his shirts out of the window when they were missing buttons -- are all depicted as happening at once so that six Twains, five Susys and at least 9 cats are visible. Perhaps this full-to-bursting book will lead some young readers to write their own in-house biographies over the summer. Just in case, Kerley includes instructions.
Abby McGanney Nolan frequently reviews for The Washington Post Book World.

Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group

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THE INVISIBLE BRIDGE
Julie Orringer
Knopf
ISBN 978 1 4000 4116 9
602 pages
$26.95

Reviewed by Donna Rifkind
The cover of Julie Orringer's first novel shows a photograph of the Chain Bridge, one of Budapest's most-loved landmarks. The picture was taken as World War II was drawing to a close, just after retreating German troops had bombed the Hungarian capital's bridges to delay the advancing Soviet offensive. In Orringer's cover photo, the Chain Bridge is a shattered remnant: Only emptiness is suspended between the pillars flanking the Danube. What we see, in that stunned moment, is an invisible bridge.
Long before the bombing of Budapest occurs at the end of this novel, Orringer uses the symbolism of invisible bridges in many inventive ways, re-engineering traditional dimensions of time and space, calibrating the immensity of world-war deaths against the specifics of one family's life, and building emotional connections between parents and children, husbands and wives, the preserved and the obliterated. And gradually, over time, she shows how supple those connections are and how instantly they can be broken.
"The Invisible Bridge" is an intricately layered historical novel that needs plenty of room to be effective, and at 600 pages it shouldn't be a paragraph shorter. Even so, its first half demands some patience. Orringer has deliberately backloaded most of the book's urgency into its later wartime sections, but its initial 300 pages, which roll out with a stately and sometimes prosaic accessibility, are an indispensable foundation for this account of the very particular way in which Hungary's Jewish population was decimated by the Holocaust.
The novel begins in 1937 in a golden haze of promise, as 22-year-old Andras Levi, the son of a lumberyard owner from a village in Hungary's eastern flatlands, departs for Paris to study at the Ecole Speciale d'Architecture, where he has won a scholarship. Andras is glad to leave behind the quota restrictions that prevent Jewish students from enrolling in Hungary's universities, though while en route to France he can't ignore the menacing signs ("Jews Not Wanted") and Nazi flags in the small-town German train stations.
Paris, for Andras, is a giddy circuit of academic lectures, spirited political arguments in Latin Quarter cafes, all-night design projects and a job at the Sarah-Bernhardt Theatre, which is mounting a new Brecht play. "I have a desperate garret; it's everything I hoped for," he writes happily to his older brother, who has remained in Hungary but is hoping to attend medical school in Italy.
Soon enough, romance enters Andras' Paris idyll in the form of Klara Morgenstern, a gray-eyed ballet teacher nearly a decade his senior who brings along a sullen teenage daughter and a past full of secrets. But the window to Andras' bright future fractures into shards after his student visa is revoked and he's forced to return to Budapest. When war breaks out in September 1939, he's immediately conscripted into the Hungarian labor service. His exalted visions of art and architecture are erased by the shock of hard labor, and he's transformed from a young man with the luxury of choices to "a speck of human dust, lost on the eastern edge of Europe."
At this point we begin to visualize the connection between the book's first half, where Orringer so assiduously humanizes Andras, and the second, where she just as painstakingly chronicles his forced dehumanization, along with the dispersal of his family and the dismantling of an entire world. Yet in a landscape gone dark, here and there we perceive an invisible bridge: an improbable reunion; an impossible rescue; a tale of survival that hinges on a bread crust, a drop of melted snow and a poorly covered mass grave.
We have seen images like these many times before, in the literature of eyewitnesses such as Elie Wiesel and Imre Kertesz, and increasingly in the fiction of younger writers, who are roughly the age of those eyewitnesses' grandchildren (Orringer is 37). In what way is "The Invisible Bridge" different, and why is it important?
With the writers of Orringer's generation who choose the Holocaust as a subject, we're watching an inevitable transition from a literature that can remember to a literature that can only imagine. Does the winking magic realism of Jonathan Safran Foer's "Everything is Illuminated" call more attention to the author than to his subject? Does the Hollywood-style feel-goodery of David Benioff's "City of Thieves" put too smooth a polish on mass suffering and death?
Orringer avoids these pitfalls and many more by making brilliant use of a deliberately old-fashioned realism to define individual fates engulfed by history's deadly onrush. She maintains a fine balance between the novel's intimate moments -- whose emotional acuity will be familiar to admirers of her 2003 story collection, "How to Breathe Underwater" -- and its panoramic set-pieces. Even those monumental scenes manage to display a tactful humility: This is a story, they keep reminding us, (BEG ITAL)and it's not bringing anybody back.(END ITAL) With its moving acknowledgment of the gap between what's been lost and what can be imagined, this remarkably accomplished first novel is itself, in the continuing stream of Holocaust literature, an invisible bridge.
Donna Rifkind is a writer in Los Angeles.

Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group

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