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Sunday, October 31, 2010

John Keats


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For You
Sunday October 31, 2010
Dear Classic Book Readers,





    John Keats
    John Keats

    (Oct. 31, 1795 - Feb. 23, 1821)
    Keats was sent to school early, beginning his love of literature, but was removed upon the death of his mother. Later in his youth, his brother was entrusted to his care; during this time, Keats wrote "Endymion," which was met with a great deal of abuse from critics. However, his poetry - especially his collection of odes - became popular and highly esteemed by the end of the 19th century, and are considered today to be some of the most perfect English poetry ever written. He died of tuberculosis, like many members of his family, and is buried in Rome with the epitaph, "Here lies one whose name was writ in water."

    Featured Book and Quizzes


    Featured book by John Keats: Poems, 1817

    This week's quizzes:
    Emily Dickinson
    Poetry First Lines
    Who Was Shakespeare?

    This Week's Birthdays


    Stephen Crane -- November 1, 1871
    Writer who gained fame for his novel The Red Badge of Courage.
    Read Great Short Works of Stephen Crane at BookDaily.

    Sam Shepard -- November 5, 1943
    Major American playwright whose works blend Old West imagery and pop culture.
    Read Rolling Thunder Logbook by Sam Shepard at BookDaily.

    James Jones -- November 6, 1921
    Writer of From Here to Eternity whose work focused on military life.
    Read The Merry Month of May by James Jones at BookDaily.





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    "The Hilliker Curse" and "Empire of Dreams"


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    Washington Post Book Reviews
    For You
    Sunday October 31, 2010
      THE HILLIKER CURSE: My Pursuit of Women
      James Ellroy
      Knopf
      ISBN 978 0 307 59350 4
      203 pages
      $24.95

      Reviewed by Aaron Leitko
      James Ellroy looms large in American crime fiction. The author of hard-boiled detective novels such as "L.A. Confidential" and "The Black Dahlia," he's a man of grim wit and bleak, staccato prose. Be thankful he's not your ex-boyfriend, though. When it comes to relationships, he's a bit of an over-sharer. In his memoir, "The Hilliker Curse," Ellroy details his lifelong obsession with women -- from his mother (whose maiden name was Hilliker), murdered when the author was 10 years old, to his various flings, flames and strolls down the aisle.
      Ellroy's early dalliances are frequently humiliating for him, often grotesque. "My zits popped in the throes of my real and her feigned passion," he writes of a formative roll in the hay. "I was staggeringly uncool and required deep pore cleansing and dermabrasion." There are tales of X-ray goggles, home invasions and adultery.
      But Ellroy remembers wanting more than just carnal satisfaction. He's a born romantic on a quest to find The One, the Red Goddess, a big-time, all-consuming love. It's an obsession that has fueled his literary career, propelling him from gutter-dwelling golf caddy to best-selling author. "I know that women I have summoned in dreams and mental snapshots will make their way to me," he writes. "Divine presence forms the core of my gift." He's not a total sleaze-bag, just a little self-absorbed.
      Aaron Leitko can be reached at leitkoa(at symbol)washpost.com.

      Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group

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      EMPIRE OF DREAMS: The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille
      Scott Eyman
      Simon & Schuster
      ISBN 978 0 7432 8955 9
      579 pages
      $35

      Reviewed by Adam Bernstein
      Cecil B. DeMille was a struggling writer, actor and director -- a self-described "refugee from bankruptcy" -- when he half- jokingly suggested to a producer friend in 1912 that they give up on Broadway and join the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa. "No," said his friend, Jesse Lasky, "if you want excitement, let's go into pictures." Within two years, they had established themselves as a force in the nascent industry with "The Squaw Man," generally considered the first full-length Hollywood feature.
      DeMille (1881-1959) poured his considerable gusto into learning the art of motion pictures, and how to make them bigger and better than anyone else at the time. He displayed immediate command of the cinematic language, especially in vigorous pacing and flamboyant scope. He helped expand the possibilities of the medium and push the boundaries of what the moviegoing experience could be, and he was Hollywood's master of spectacle and bombast for four decades. "Empire of Dreams," Scott Eyman's biography of DeMille and the first written with complete access to the filmmaker's archives, provides a compelling window into the rise of Hollywood as a movie capital.
      Through revealing anecdote and fresh research, Eyman adroitly navigates DeMille's contradictions. He was an early innovator who later chose showmanship over artistry, a conservative reactionary during the McCarthy era who also held absolute convictions about creative freedom (at least for himself), a man generous with old colleagues but parsimonious with members of his own family, and a masterful judge of talent whose films were weighed down with kitsch. Consider Anne Baxter as Nefretiri crying out to Charlton Heston in the 1956 remake of DeMille's own "The Ten Commandments": "Oh Moses, Moses, you stubborn, splendid, adorable fool!"
      As Eyman rightfully observes of DeMille's aesthetics, he willfully remained "a nineteenth century man of the theater -- his greatest strength, as well as his greatest limitation." In addition to those two versions of "The Ten Commandments," he churned out grand-scale movies centered on Jesus ("The King of Kings") and King Richard of England ("The Crusades"). He made rousing, if undistinguished, movies celebrating Manifest Destiny ("Union Pacific," "The Plainsman") and the venerable circus melodrama "The Greatest Show on Earth" (1952), for which he received his only Oscar for directing.
      He crossbred visual panache and hedonistic flair, notably in "Sign of the Cross" (1932), with a lesbian dance sequence, a lithe Claudette Colbert bathing in milk, and Charles Laughton playing an extravagantly gay Nero. Years earlier, DeMille had made exuberant marital comedies starring Gloria Swanson. Eyman provides a wonderful vignette of DeMille commanding Swanson in an extended bathing scene from "Male and Female" (1919): "Prolong it! Relish the smell of the rosewater. More rapture!" No one excelled more at selling implausibility. "You really believed that they were taking Jerusalem or worshipping the Golden Calf," director Martin Scorsese once said. "This is why the name 'DeMille' meant that I was going to see a real movie."
      Eyman, a journalist and author of previous biographies of film-colony titans including studio mogul Louis B. Mayer and director John Ford, calls DeMille an innovator whose influence still resonates in the contemporary works of Steven Spielberg and James Cameron. DeMille, Eyman writes, "incarnated the world's idea of Hollywood: gleefully dramatic, willfully unsophisticated, exuberantly, joyously excessive. He transcended his individual identity to become the living embodiment of the movie director and, beyond that, the embodiment of Hollywood itself."
      Even if his films kept a devoted audience, after his death DeMille's reputation fell precipitously among film critics and scholars, who considered his rousing adventures and Bible-based epics anachronistic. Readers are left with Eyman's helpful insights into the films themselves. Not only does he believe they hold up and are worthy of reevaluation, but he also emphasizes the exceptional skill it takes to finance and produce an epic.
      He gives the sense that one of DeMille's greatest talents as a filmmaker was crowd control. Having transplanted thousands of Hollywood bit players into the Mexican desert to make "The King of Kings" (1927), DeMille grabbed a megaphone and summoned everyone to attention. A cast member had died, he told the assembled horde, leaving behind a grieving widow and eight children. As the cast bowed their heads, DeMille ordered the cameras to crank. In fact, no one had died, but this was the shot he wanted: a mass demonstration of solemnity.
      It was extraordinarily perverse and extraordinarily effective -- and typically DeMille.
      Adam Bernstein is obituaries editor of The Washington Post. He can be reached at bernsteina(at symbol)washpost.com.

      Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group

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      Saturday, October 30, 2010

      "Songs of Blood and Sword" and "Washington: A Life"


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      Washington Post Book Reviews
      For You
      Saturday October 30, 2010
        SONGS OF BLOOD AND SWORD: A Daughter's Memoir
        Fatima Bhutto
        Nation
        ISBN 978-1-56858-632-8
        470 pages
        $26.95

        Reviewed by Thomas W. Lippman
        In the 63 years since Pakistan became an independent country, it has had rulers who were incompetent, corrupt, dictatorial or sometimes all three. Two of those leaders were named Bhutto: Zulfikar Ali, prime minister in the 1970s, deposed in a military coup and later hanged by order of his successor, and his daughter Benazir, prime minister from 1988 to 1990 and again from 1993 to 1996. She was assassinated as she attempted to return to power in 2007. The current president, Asif Zardari, was her husband.
        Wealthy, well-educated and deeply political, the Bhuttos have sometimes been described as the Kennedys of Pakistan, complete with Harvard degrees and violent deaths. But they are more like the Borgias, as becomes all too apparent in this intensely personal, vengeful narrative by Fatima Bhutto, granddaughter of Zulfikar, niece of Benazir and daughter of a third slain Bhutto, Benazir's brother Murtaza. Yet another Bhutto, Shahnawaz, younger brother of Murtaza, was poisoned in 1985.
        There are really three books within "Songs of Blood and Sword." One is an account of Pakistan's appalling history since the 1950s. One is a young woman's memoir of her family, which has been at the center of that history. The third is a detective story: Who was responsible for the fatal police shooting of Murtaza Bhutto in 1996?
        The author's conclusion, reached after interviews with scores of her father's friends, professors and political allies, is that the police shot Murtaza on orders from his sister Benazir. The motivation, according to Fatima Bhutto, was that Murtaza, once released from the jail where Benazir's government had confined him, was challenging Benazir and her husband for control of the Pakistan People's Party and thus posed a threat to the vast wealth they had amassed through spectacular corruption.
        "Benazir and her cronies were now backed against a wall," Fatima writes of her father, who to her was the only person in the family who could do no wrong. "Murtaza's threat was manageable for them when he was behind bars and access to him and his ability to speak to the people were restricted. Now that he was free, he was unstoppable."
        Fatima Bhutto found no smoking gun, but she unearthed plenty of circumstantial evidence, including the fact that the police took her wounded father to a hospital where they knew no surgeon was on duty, and that the scene of her father's killing was hosed down and cleansed of evidence within a few hours. A tribunal concluded that Murtaza's killing could not have happened without orders from high authority.
        She is disgusted that the chain of death in the Bhutto family has resulted in Asif Zardari's becoming president. "This is the legacy Benazir has left behind for Pakistan," her niece writes -- a "saprophytic culture" in which Zardari is the organism that lives off the corpses. Do not invite Fatima Bhutto and Asif Zardari to the same dinner party. She lives in Karachi, but judging by her account of its political environment she might be well advised not to return there after her U.S. book tour.
        Fatima Bhutto, a journalist who was educated at Columbia and the University of London -- breaking the family's Harvard tradition -- is not yet 30 years old, and her youth shows in this undisciplined book. It is at least 50 pages too long, larded with self-indulgent emotional outbursts and personality sketches of minor characters, and her reflexive anti-Americanism is tiresome. Her occasional references to U.S. policy sound like snippets of a conversation with Che Guevara, whose poster Murtaza Bhutto mounted in his room at Harvard. She actually believes that U.S. troops herded Vietnamese villagers into urban communities because "that made it much easier for the US army to bomb civilians in their separated enclaves," as if that were the army's objective.
        Yet her book will be valuable to readers who want to understand why Pakistan is such an ungovernable mess. In her account, the country's entire political culture is based on corruption, violence, opportunism, mendacity and a feudal economic system. Even the revered Zulfikar, whose mantle everyone in this book tries to claim, tinkered with the constitution to advance his own power. "He was a polarizing figure," his granddaughter writes. "You either loved Zulfikar or hated him." She loved him, but then she used to love her Aunt Benazir too.
        Thomas W. Lippman is an adjunct senior fellow for Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

        Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group

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        WASHINGTON: A Life
        Ron Chernow
        Penguin Press
        ISBN 978-1-59420-266-7
        904 pages
        $40

        Reviewed by T.J. Stiles
        George Washington did not have wooden teeth. He had human teeth, which he bought from slaves, who pulled them from their own mouths. Washington had them fashioned into dentures, anchored with gold wire to his last native tooth. The apparatus distorted his features. Any pressure pained him -- a bite of food, even public speaking. Humiliated, he tried to keep his affliction secret. On top of his increasing deafness, it made him seem aloof.
        Ron Chernow describes this dental hell in "Washington," and rarely have missing bicuspids been used to such effect. Here we see the strengths of this biography: the interweaving of the inner and outer man; a sensitivity to the impact of a seemingly minor matter; the juxtaposition of a civic saint with the trade in human flesh (or calcium, in this case). But the very intimacy of the story hints at this book's limitations. Like Washington's teeth, his life as told here is less than fully rooted in its surroundings.
        Let's be clear: "Washington" is a true achievement. A reader might agree with my criticisms yet thoroughly enjoy the book. That speaks to the triumph of Chernow's narrative structure, the depth of his research, and how alive he is to the emotional content of dry material. In organically unifying Washington's private and public lives, he accomplishes a feat that eludes many biographers. And he propels readers forward. There were moments on my march to the end of his story on page 817 when I thought he could have shortened the trip, yet I still felt that the writing was purposeful, not merely encyclopedic.
        He attains this despite an uneven prose style. At times, cliches and dead phrases rustle noisily on the path. ("Throwing caution to the wind," Washington found the "cards stacked against him" and had to "cool his heels.") Chernow pumps up descriptions as if he were Stan Lee writing about Spider-Man: The "powerfully rough-hewn" Washington's "matchless strength" increases to "superhuman strength" in the same paragraph. The breathlessness becomes counterproductive. An assertion that a wilderness expedition was "incomparably daunting" naturally calls to mind entirely comparable journeys.
        But the grand redwood forest of Washington's life draws attention away from the debris underfoot. Chernow builds sympathy for a man born into the ruling class of colonial Virginia, the slave-owning gentry. Desperate for a commission in the king's army, young Washington resented the mildest slight. He stumbled in battle, won glory and learned to discipline himself. When the Revolution came, he was ready to lead. His strength of will and sheer presence helped keep an underequipped and undermanned army in the field for year after shoeless year.
        Chernow splendidly describes Washington's troubled relationship with money. The Father of His Country owned a great deal of his country -- tens of thousands of acres -- and scores of slaves. Yet he was constantly in debt, thanks in part to his lavish lifestyle. He even needed a loan to attend his own presidential inauguration. Financial matters eroded his storied self-control; he became by turns inventive, infuriated and self-pitying. Chernow honestly explores Washington's contradictory ideas about slavery, too. He endorsed abolition yet, short of money, drove his slaves hard and secretly pursued runaways during his presidency.
        Chernow's goal is to humanize Washington. He succeeds handsomely, depicting an irreducibly complicated figure. Remarkable as Washington was, however, he remained embedded in his times. Unfortunately, Chernow doesn't really engage with the scholarship of Bernard Bailyn, Pauline Maier, Edward Countryman or the many other historians who have revealed so much about 18th-century America.
        Take Washington's obsession with appearances, with expensive carriages and fashionable clothes. To understand it, we should know that contemporaries saw social stratification as not only natural, but desirable. In an age of multilayered property requirements for enfranchisement, Americans deferred to the leadership of the wealthy -- specifically, those rich in real estate. In theory, landed gentry passively collected rent and other income, which made them a disinterested elite, equipped to guide the rest of society. To be fully effective as a leader, Washington had to appear to be a man of leisure, rather than the debtor he was, tossed about by financial interests.
        Yet the "radicalism of the American Revolution" (to use Gordon Wood's phrase) politicized a broad swath of middling sorts, who are largely absent from this biography. Chernow's account of Alexander Hamilton's struggle with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison naturally tilts toward Hamilton; more seriously, it doesn't capture the extent to which Jeffersonianism went far beyond Jefferson.
        Washington and Hamilton sought to direct economic development from above, by, for example, incorporating the Bank of the United States. But Jeffersonians saw corporations as corrupt devices by which the king had granted favors to supporters; Adam Smith himself condemned corporations in "The Wealth of Nations." America's competitive individualism took root in this opposition to elite rule. As historian Joyce Appleby writes, "Smith's invisible hand was warmly clasped by the Republicans." It's worth reading "Washington" alongside "Madison and Jefferson," by Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg, two academic historians more sympathetic to the views of Hamilton's foes. (Disclosure: I provided a promotional quote for "Madison and Jefferson.")
        By page 817, I shared Chernow's clear-eyed admiration for Washington as a selfless leader of the new republic. But the source of his greatness may have been that he so thoroughly embodied the values of a hierarchical culture that the Revolution fortunately doomed.
        T.J. Stiles is the author of "The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt," winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize and 2009 National Book Award.

        Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group

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        Friday, October 29, 2010

        "Blood-Dark Track" and "On the Nickel"


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        Washington Post Book Reviews
        For You
        Friday October 29, 2010
          BLOOD-DARK TRACK: A Family History
          Joseph O'Neill
          Vintage
          ISBN 978-0307472953
          338 pages
          $15.95

          Reviewed by Marie Arana. Arana, a writer at large for The Washington Post, is the author of "American Chica," "Cellophane" and "Lima Nights."
          A gaping rift separates memoir and history, but Joseph O'Neill negotiates it nimbly in "Blood-Dark Track," an account of two men in the fitful years before World War II. A chasm divides East and West, too, but O'Neill negotiates it just as agilely, for the men in his sights lived in disputed lands -- one in Turkey, the other, Ireland. Inhabiting distant worlds, both were victims of war and revolution. In time, as fate would have it, their bloodlines met in a man well equipped to tell their stories -- their grandson, the novelist Joseph O'Neill.
          O'Neill has already proven that he understands what it means to be caught in the jaws of history. He is the author of the prize-winning novel "Netherland," in which a Dutchman finds himself in Manhattan just as two airplanes plow the skyline. For all the potential pitfalls of that 9/11 setting, the book is an astute portrait of a captive of circumstance, trammeled by political passions beyond his control.
          The bedlam into which O'Neill now delivers us is the nervous world of prewar Europe. The book begins in the 1930s, when Turkey and Ireland were cauldrons of rebellion and intrigue. Before the prologue is through, we learn that the British arrested and imprisoned O'Neill's Turkish grandfather, a hotelier, as he traveled to Palestine to buy fruit. At roughly the same time, O'Neill's other grandfather was captured and jailed as a terrorist in Ireland. These were not entirely mystifying occurrences; the men's personal histories, as it turns out, were murky and suspicious. Jim O'Neill was a member of the IRA, a suspect in the murder of a prominent admiral. Joseph Dakad was an avowed Germanophile, a footloose, urbane businessman who might easily have been a spy.
          The journey on which we are subsequently taken is less a swift chase than a meticulously detailed investigation. Joseph O'Neill, who was a barrister before he left his practice to write full time, peels back each layer of the past with care and deliberation. In the process, he displays considerable research skills, but he also exposes a touching tenderness for his family and a rare wisdom about the complicated world at large.
          Jim O'Neill was a truck driver in Cork: a tireless worker and responsible family man, gainfully employed by the city's roads department. That was before a fateful spring evening in 1936, when Vice-Admiral Henry Boyle Somerville, a Cork resident -- thought by some to be a British sympathizer -- was gunned down in the doorway of his home. No one was ever arrested for the murder, but within three months the occupying British government declared the IRA an unlawful institution. The result, quite naturally, was that rebel sentiment became even more violent. There were few republicans who couldn't recall earlier days of panic, when "British forces ran wild" in the streets, "murdering and causing mayhem."
          "Jim O'Neill," his grandson now writes, "threw himself into paramilitary life with characteristic determination." His first action after the admiral's murder was meant to be a raid on British army barracks, but the IRA never quite pulled it off. Soon after, a chilling battery of terror followed: England's electrical lines and power stations were blown up; there were bombs in London cinemas and the underground, tear gas in public spaces, a Liverpool bridge and a government post office brought to rubble. In January 1939, the IRA's governing body declared all-out war on Britain. A countrywide manhunt followed, and IRA members were hauled in by the hundreds. By the end of 1940, virtually all known republicans, including Jim O'Neill, were locked up in internment camps. Spit out by the system almost five years later, Jim O'Neill was never quite the same: Broken, taking odd jobs here and there, he went from one building site to another with his spade and bicycle. Eventually he found work as a garbage hauler.
          O'Neill intersperses this striking account with a parallel story, which was raveling at the same time on the other side of the globe. In Mersin, Turkey, Joseph Dakad was the owner of a bustling hotel -- a bon vivant in the squall of war, not unlike Rick in the gathering gloom of "Casablanca." He was a "skirt-chaser," a traveling man, riding the rails of the famed Taurus Express wherever it might take him to buy supplies for his bustling business. A lively watering hole for guests from around the world (whether Allied or Nazi), the Toros Otel never felt it necessary to declare sides in the escalating war.
          In March 1942, Joseph Dakad set out for Jerusalem to buy lemons. "On his way home," as O'Neill tells it, "he was arrested at the Turkish-Syrian border by the British. He was taken to Haifa and then to the British headquarters in Jerusalem." After that, he disappeared into the maw of war.
          Even after an armistice was signed, even after most internees were freed, Joseph continued to be held. Four months after the close of the European war, he was finally let go -- a paranoid depressive who had attempted suicide more than once.
          The grace of this story is in O'Neill's patient scrutiny and illustration. Global circumstances end up connecting these hauntingly similar yet distinct captivities, "one in the Levant heat, the other in the rainy, sporadically incandescent plains of central Ireland." The tale is further illumined by vivid portraits of two grandmothers: one, a perfumed cosmopolitan in silks who could shriek her displeasure in three languages; the other a flinty partner who stashed rebel guns in her floorboards and welcomed anyone who needed harbor.
          What will surprise the reader of this dense, seemingly bifurcated story is the very simple, concrete theme at the heart of it: Wars have a way of boiling down to concentrated human dramas; and world wars can link those dramas in surprising ways. Suffice it to say that, impossible as it may seem, an intricate worldwide net was already a pulsing reality in that long-ago, faraway time.
          By the end of this book, you will understand its century-old epigraph: "It was there in that land of the Arabs ... that I awoke to the echoes of guns being fired in the capital of my own country, Ireland."
          Globalization has been with us for a very long time.

          Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group

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          John Shannon
          Severn House
          ISBN 978 0 7278 6903 6
          278 pages
          $28.95

          Reviewed by Art Taylor, who regularly reviews mysteries and thrillers for The Washington Post
          Since "The Concrete River" (1996), the first book in his vastly underappreciated Jack Liffey series, Los Angeles-based crime novelist John Shannon has been both blessed and dogged by comparisons to Raymond Chandler. Shannon occasionally goes down familiar mean streets and has established himself as a master of social realism, rigorously exploring various ethnic and enclave communities in Southern California.
          But he is also prone to make sudden surrealistic swerves and delve more explicitly and trenchantly than his contemporaries into divisive political issues and existential quandaries: a debate on the Patriot Act, for example, in a kangaroo court rigged by rogue Homeland Security types ("The Dark Streets"); or a theological discussion amid a swirl of violence ("The Devils of Bakersfield)." Sometimes the diversions rise to Beckettian levels of absurdity and moral provocation. Far from being escapist fare, these books aim to be novels of ideas.
          As "On the Nickel" opens, Liffey seems a true Beckett hero. Mute and paralyzed after injuries from a previous investigation, he uses a wheelchair, and his every attempt at speech comes out simply "Ack, ack" -- "like Daffy Duck," his daughter Maeve comments. Liffey's mind remains as sharp as ever, but his daughter's in charge these days, and when a phone call comes from Liffey's best friend, requesting help with finding his runaway son Conor, it's Maeve who takes the case.
          Inquisitive, passionate, unpredictable Maeve Liffey has been a controversial aspect of previous books (just check out some vitriolic Amazon reader reviews), but to my mind she has evolved into one of the most interesting characters in contemporary crime fiction. She's not a troubled kid, but she has endured a full range of adolescent issues, and she infuriates her father with her tendency to go Nancy Drew and with the business cards she tries to hide from him: "Liffey and Liffey, Investigations." Liffey's own card says, "I Find Missing Children," and it's often Maeve whom he most fears losing.
          With her dad incapacitated, Maeve goes solo with impunity, and her quest for missing Conor takes her into the darkest part of L.A.'s Skid Row -- known locally as The Nickel -- a 50-block area hosting the largest concentration of homeless people in the United States. Conor, an aspiring musician, has found himself there as part of his own quest for real-world experiences beyond his cloistered, privileged upbringing. Though Maeve locates him quickly, their troubles have only begun, and they're soon caught in the crossfire of a heated battle between rich developers intent on gentrification and the last tenants at a decaying flophouse, a trio of old Jewish men calling themselves the Resistance.
          While the action is relentless -- vandalism, kidnapping, assault, robbery, arson, murder -- the main characters are also on a spiritual journey. Canvassing Skid Row with Conor's picture in hand, Maeve likens the scene to "a whole post-apocalyptic world of people who were out on their own in the hard rain, hunting for someone they had lost or a job they desperately needed or just the big lottery ticket." Even the most terrifying of the villains here -- a knife-wielding, Nietzsche-quoting psycho -- ponders "convention and morality" and the stages of his own evolution from camel to lion and back to "the infant who's going to grow up to be the superman."
          Its vitality notwithstanding, "On the Nickel" may not be the best starting point for those unfamiliar with Shannon's novels. The hero's extreme predicament might prove off-putting for first-time readers, and the rich-vs.-poor discussion seems more didactic and one-sided than Shannon's earlier explorations of what he calls "L.A.'s grand comedy." But for anyone following these adventures already, "On the Nickel" will be a solid addition to a series that consistently provokes and surprises.

          Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group

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          Thursday, October 28, 2010

          "The Finkler Question," "Our Kind of Traitor," more


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          Washington Post Book Reviews
          For You
          Thursday October 28, 2010
            MISSING LUCILE: Memories of the Grandmother I Never Knew
            Suzanne Berne
            Algonquin
            ISBN 978 1 56512 625 1
            296 pages
            $23.95

            Reviewed by Carolyn See, who reviews books every Friday for The Washington Post
            Here's the back story of "Missing Lucile": Suzanne Berne's great-grandfather was B.H. Kroger, the Cincinnati grocery magnate who once owned a zillion grocery stores all across the Midwest. "He shouted," Berne writes, "he swore, he insulted with breathtaking dexterity." B.H.'s first wife died after rapidly having borne him seven children. He was Mr. Nouveau Riche, rough, tough and uneducated, but you couldn't argue with the fact of his money.
            His children would make do in different ways. Suzanne's grandmother, Lucile, went to Wellesley College, came home during World War I and became treasurer of the Kroger company, as well as her father's private secretary. Then, when the war ended, she had to give her job back. She joined a rescue unit organized by Wellesley that journeyed to a small, war-torn village in France. She spent almost a year teaching mothers how to be good parents and little children how to play games. When that mission folded, Lucile went back to Cincinnati to live in her father's house. She was over 30. She spotted a genteel, refined but poor German baritone, and they were married within two months. She built a beautiful house (with her father's money), had two darling little boys of her own and died at the age of 43, of stomach cancer, in 1932.
            But here is the plot point in all this: Lucile was evidently not a very good mother. Suzanne's father got it into his head early on that his mother never loved him. "He has always been sad," Berne writes. "Melancholy. Inconsolable. A man who is missing something." Because not only did Lucile die when Berne's father was 6, she had been remote and cold when she was alive. She never smiled at him, which gave him a justifiable case of the sulks for the rest of his life.
            The author, upon whom all this sulking impinged, decided to conjure up this missing mother for him. A novelist who teaches at Boston College, she really put her heart into this enterprise, except for when she didn't, which results in an infuriatingly uneven biography.
            Thus: The emblematic moment in her father's childhood, as Berne recounts it. While his mother was working in the garden, "he was eating little red cinnamon candies, Red Hearts, as they were called then, and still are, I believe. At some point she ... asked him if she could have a few of the candies. He said no. She looked at him closely, then asked if he really couldn't give a Red Heart to his mother. He shook his head." Then, the author speculates and lets her imagination run charmingly, as she is wont to do in this narrative: "I only wish he had been eating peppermints. But such is the tenacity of metaphor: this memory wouldn't persist, most likely, if my father hadn't been hoarding Red Hearts. As for my grandmother, the bulbs she was planting were surely narcissus." Most people who have ever bought candy at the movies or decided to make cinnamon apple sauce will suspect these candies were cinnamon Red Hots, made by the Ferrara Pan company beginning in 1932, which would make factual sense, but Berne seems unwilling to investigate this -- or much else -- further.
            The author obtains much of her information about the Kroger family from a coffee-table book called "The Kroger Story," published in 1973. "I bought it," she writes, "off Amazon.com for twelve dollars." About an early ancestor in the mid-19th century, she says, after imagining that his parents lived in poverty: "The mother sits tiredly at her spinning wheel with a hank of tallowy grayish wool while the father puts on his green felt hat with the little red feather and trudges over to the (BEG ITAL)Rathaus(END ITAL) to hear the latest bad news."
            One might wish that the author didn't rely so heavily on a book that was probably commissioned for publicity by the Kroger company decades ago. But Berne appears to blossom most when she has the least material to work with. That's how she gets to bring in Harry Thaw, Benjamin Harrison, Mark Twain, Alice Longworth and others. During Lucile's high school years, about which there is the least available information, Berne decides that Lucile went to two different boarding schools in Washington, because their names appear in a copy of a book she had, even though Lucile's Wellesley College transcript says she went to "the College Preparatory School for Girls in Cincinnati." No, Berne says, "let's just say she went to high school in Washington. I myself went to high school in Washington and I don't remember it very well either." Besides, this way we get to hear about Alice Roosevelt: "Alice was nineteen and preparing to marry Ohio representative Nicholas Longworth, from Cincinnati. Longworth was thirty-three. A famous roue who played the violin, swilled whiskey, ran after women, and could charm even the most bumptious crowd of voters."
            I'm not sure how much this tale tells us about Lucile. But perhaps it tells us something about the author. Remembering the famous Alice Longworth quip "If you can't say anything good about someone, sit right here by me," Berne suggests her own motto might be: "If you don't know what you're talking about, have a seat." She said it, I didn't.
            Her father, the melancholy one, got his Ph.D. from an unaccredited college and remained in a funk for the rest of his life because he never rose above adjunct professor. Presumably, he didn't want to do the boring work that went along with a bona fide degree. If I can speculate -- certainly the author's favorite pastime -- this may be an inherited family trait.

            Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group

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            THE CLASSICAL TRADITION
            Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, Salvatore Settis
            Belknap/Harvard Univ.
            ISBN 978-0674035720
            1,067 pages
            $49.95

            Reviewed by Michael Dirda. Visit Dirda's online book discussion at washingtonpost.com/readingroom.
            Now here is a fabulous book -- and a bargain to boot. Harvard has produced this gigantic volume, packed with color plates and essays by some of the greatest scholars alive, for the price of a couple of hardback thrillers. Better still, while "The Classical Tradition" may look like a work of reference, it's actually one of the best bedside books you could ask for. I know because I've been browsing around in it with immense pleasure for the past two weeks.
            "The Classical Tradition" aims to "provide a reliable and wide-ranging guide to the reception of classical Graeco-Roman antiquity in all its dimensions in later cultures." This means that this "guide" -- the editors are careful not to call it a full-scale lexicon, dictionary or encyclopedia -- examines "the continuing influence of ancient Greek and Roman culture in the post-classical world." The back cover shows, in miniature, what they mean: On the left is a picture of the famous sculpture representing Laocoon and his sons being strangled by a serpent. On the right is a Charles Addams cartoon depicting a butcher and two assistants struggling with a huge length of sausage. It's the very same pose.
            The arts have always gone back to the classics for inspiration and templates -- think of James Joyce's "Ulysses" or the great Brazilian movie "Black Orpheus" or the recent epic films "Gladiator," "Troy" and "300" or even DC Comics' Wonder Woman, aka Princess Diana of the Amazons. In Washington (D.C.) we work in buildings modeled after those one might find in ancient Rome. Fraternities and sororities are commonly called "Greek" societies. Gay theorists regard Plato's "Symposium" as a sacred text. Even in the digital age, anyone with any education whatsoever deeply envies those with a solid knowledge of Latin and Greek. Antiquity pervades our 21st-century lives, whether we realize it or not.
            "The Classical Tradition" is organized as a series of 563 articles by 339 scholars and ranges from "Academy" and "Achilles" to "Xenophon," "Zeno's Paradoxes" and "Zoology." Besides the very distinguished editors, the contributors include esteemed figures from Britain (Mary Beard, Simon Hornblower), dozens of academicians from around the world and such eminent local heavyweights as Walter Stephens and Marcel Detienne (Johns Hopkins), Martin Winkler (George Mason), Mortimer Sellers (University of Baltimore School of Law), Jan Ziolkowski (Dumbarton Oaks), James O'Donnell (Georgetown), Philip Jacks and Elizabeth Fisher (George Washington) and independent scholar Pamela O. Long.
            While some of the articles in "The Classical Tradition" are just a few paragraphs long, many of the best are substantial essays. I can't pretend to have read every entry, but I've already gobbled up 30 or 40 on the subjects that most interest me. These include "Apuleius," "Asterix," "Automata," "Richard Bentley," "Circe," "Comic Books," "Homosexuality," "Horace," "Hypnerotomachia Poliphili," "Leda," "Liberal Arts," "Loeb Classical Library," "Magic," "Melancholy," "Novel," "Ovid," "Presocratics," "Rhetoric," "Joseph Justus Scaliger," "Sexuality," "Sirens," "Suicide," "Translation," "Ut pictura poesis" and "Urlich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff."
            At the very least, such a short and highly personal list does give some inkling of this guide's enormous sweep. "Hypnerotomachia Poliphili," by the way, is a hauntingly suggestive and erotic Renaissance allegory -- full of classical motifs -- that has attracted several modern fantasy writers, including John Crowley and Elizabeth Hand. Horace's catchphrase "Ut pictura poesis" ("as is painting, so is poetry") embodies the influential doctrine by which a work of visual art is read as a "mute poem" and descriptive poetry is seen as a "talking painting." J.J. Scaliger (1540-1609), Richard Bentley (1662-1742) and Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (1848-1931) are, arguably, the three greatest classical scholars of all time. I was sorry that America's most influential classicist, Johns Hopkins' astonishing Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve (1831-1924), was left out.
            Much of the information contained in "The Classical Tradition" is simply nifty stuff worth knowing. Heraclitus is remembered for the observation that you cannot step into the same river twice. Why? Because his philosophy is built around the notion that "everything flows." The Greek for this phrase, the Heraclitus entry tells us, is "pantha rhei." Saint Jerome complained that monks concentrated so much on sacred texts, ruminating on every word, that the result was "lugentes non legentes" ("mourning, not reading"). Apuleius' story of Cupid and Psyche was not only used for an opera libretto by Canadian novelist Robertson Davies but also served as the model for Eudora Welty's "The Robber Bridegroom" and C.S. Lewis' "Till We Have Faces."
            Within limits, the authors of the various entries are allowed to be as individual as they like. In the course of a superb brief account of Horace's poetry and its afterlife, Glenn Most tells us that Milton's translation of the famous Pyrrha Ode "is generally regarded as the worst rendition in English." In the article on translation, Stuart Gillespie notes that "a recent bibliography records more than 40 book-length translations and imitations of Ovid in English from 1950 to 2004." Throughout this same essay, Gillespie returns again and again to the various styles of classical translation, a polarizing issue made famous in a debate between Matthew Arnold and F.W. Newman. "Should the archaic and alien be registered by a translator, disrupting the English-language norms of his days (as Newman argued), or should Homer be made to sound simple, natural, unquaint (as Arnold did)? Subsequent English versions of Homer -- and there was no shortage -- could go in either direction."
            To repeat, every page here provides some fascinating bit of information. Who are the five figures who kept alive the liberal arts during the Dark Ages? Answer: Saint Augustine, Martianus Capella, Cassiodorus, Boethius and Isidore of Seville. There are individual essays on all of them (except the 6th-century Cassiodorus, who founded a monastery called the Vivarium, or Fishpond, where the monks preserved and studied the ancients as well as the Bible and church fathers).
            Certainly anyone even mildly interested in the Western cultural heritage will find "The Classical Tradition" a necessary purchase. It belongs on the shelf next to the similarly organized, and similarly essential, "A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature," edited by David Lyle Jeffrey. Together these two books show us how deeply the stories, iconic figures and ideas of antiquity succor our imaginations and still suffuse the world we live in.

            Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group

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            THE FINKLER QUESTION
            Howard Jacobson
            Bloomsbury
            ISBN 978-160819
            307 pages
            $15

            Reviewed by Ron Charles, the fiction editor of The Washington Post. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/RonCharles. He can be reached at charlesr(at symbol)washpost.com.
            Howard Jacobson's comedy about anti-Semitism, "The Finkler Question," won the $79,000 Man Booker Prize for Fiction in London, beating "Parrot & Olivier in America," by two-time winner Peter Carey, and Emma Donoghue's popular "Room." Jacobson, 68, who remains far better known in his native England than in this country, has been a prolific writer of comic novels, mostly about Jews and Jewish identity, since 1983. Several have landed on the Booker long list.
            That Jacobson could write a comedy about anti-Semitism isn't shocking nowadays. A springy piece of barbed wire runs from Charlie Chaplin's "The Great Dictator" through Mel Brooks' "The Producers," TV's "Hogan's Heroes," Sarah Silverman's Nazi riffs and all the way to Tova Reich's outrageous satire "My Holocaust," which dared to tweak Elie Wiesel and the schlocky aspect of the "never forget" industry.
            Although there is a plot, "The Finkler Question" is really a series of tragicomic meditations on one of humanity's most tenacious expressions of malice, which I realize sounds about as much fun as sitting shiva, but Jacobson's unpredictable wit is more likely to clobber you than his pathos. In these pages, he's refined the funny shtick of "Kalooki Nights" (2007) to produce a more cerebral comedy about the bizarre metastasis of anti-Semitism and the exhausting complications of Zionism.
            So yes, it's witty, but is it good for the Jews?
            I'll leave that to Rick Sanchez, but no other book has given me such a clear sense of the benevolent disguises that anti-Jewish sentiments can wear. And no one wears them more attractively than Julian Treslove, the handsome, middle-aged gentile at the center of "The Finkler Question." Chronically anxious and poisonously romantic, Julian works as a celebrity double. He "didn't look like anybody famous in particular," Jacobson admits, but he "looked like many famous people in general, and so was in demand if not by virtue of verisimilitude, at least by virtue of versatility." That chameleon-like nature, along with his favorite fantasy of a lover dying poetically in his arms, gives some idea of the grasping, blood-sucking quality of this pleasant, lonely man, "whose life had been one absurd disgrace after another."
            The story opens with a tiny burst of action -- the only real action you'll get in this ruminative novel. Julian is walking home from a pleasant dinner with two old Jewish friends who have recently lost their wives. Their grief, Jacobson notes, allows him to luxuriate vicariously in widowed reveries. As usual, Julian is imagining the calamities that could befall him -- a crane dashing out his brains, a terrorist opening fire, a road sign bruising his shin -- when suddenly he's mugged. By a woman. His injuries are minor, but while emptying his pockets, she mutters what sounds like "You Ju!" Julian is exhilarated.
            That Chekhovian touch of absurdity adds some essential buoyancy to what can be an excessively brooding tale. Julian becomes obsessed with the mugger's obscure curse. "You Jules"? "You jewel"? "You Jew"? Could his assailant, his "muggerette," have been an anti-Semite lashing out at Julian's "essential Jewishness"? It's a conundrum that awakens his long-simmering envy of his two Jewish friends and makes him determined to be a Jew himself -- the ultimate celebrity identity to stretch over the husk of his soul. "He wondered about training to be a rabbi. ... What about a lay rabbi?" Should he get circumcised? Should he read Maimonides?
            One of his two Jewish friends is Libor, a retired celebrity reporter, still deeply shaken by the death of his wife and shocked by the predicament of surviving her. The other fresh widower is Sam Finkler, an old schoolmate, the first Jewish person Julian ever met, the prototype in his mind of all Jews -- thus "The Finkler Question." Finkler is confident and bold, a successful TV personality and the author of a series of pop philosophy books, such as "The Existentialist in the Kitchen" and "The Little Book of Household Stoicism."
            "What Sam had," Jacobson writes, "was a sort of obliviousness to failure, a grandstanding cheek, which Treslove could only presume was part and parcel of the Finkler heritage. ... Such confidence, such certainty of right. ... They always had something you didn't, some verbal or theological reserve they could draw on, that would leave you stumped for a response." Desperately afraid of stereotyping Jews, Julian nonetheless luxuriates in all the classic caricatures, envying their legendary success, their history-dominating grief, even the flawless timing of their dismissive shrugs.
            Jacobson is like a man playing with a knife who starts pretending to aim for our feet. When is he joking, when is he not? Even while we're trying to disentangle what's so disturbing about Julian's special regard for Jews, the book pursues (and belabors) another line of comedy, this one about self-loathing Jews. Finkler, always desperate for attention and a public platform, takes over a group called "ASHamed Jews," an anti-Zionist group that holds endless Talmudic meetings to hammer out the precise dimensions of its members' shame, the crucial distinctions that define "ashamed of being Jewish," being "ashamed as Jews" and being "(BEG ITAL)Jewishly(END ITAL) ashamed." And all this is woven through vituperative, sometimes hilarious, sometimes tedious arguments about Israeli exceptionalism.
            Jacobson has stirred this pot before (and Philip Roth stirred it before him), but the novel's real depth develops slowly beneath the satire, as anti-Semitic attacks begin to filter into the story from around London and the world -- a boy blinded, a grave covered in swastikas, a man beaten: little echoes of the horror of the mid-20th century. "It's not Kristallnacht," Libor says with a shrug, but who knows what the next trigger will be? The great one-liners keep coming ("She dressed like a native of no place one could quite put a name to -- the People's Republic of Ethnigrad"), but the laughter starts to die in your throat as sorrow and fear accumulate on these pages like stones. "After a period of exceptional quiet," one character thinks, "anti-Semitism was becoming again what it had always been -- an escalator that never stopped, and which anyone could hop on at will."
            There are certainly reasons to find this novel annoying. Chief among them, of course, is the tiresomeness of Julian's obsessive, if benevolent, racism. All but the most severely self-loathing Jews will grow weary of Jacobson's badgering parody of self-loathing Jews. And the plot frequently gives way to lectures, discussions and set pieces that could be read in almost any order.
            On the other hand -- cue Yiddish accent -- "The Finkler Question" is often awfully funny, even while it roars its witty rage at the relentless, ever-fracturing insanity of anti-Semitism, which threatens to drive its victims a little crazy, too. This is, after all, a comedy that begins and ends in grief.

            Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group

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            OUR KIND OF TRAITOR
            John le Carre
            Viking
            ISBN 978-0670022243
            306 pages
            $27.95

            Reviewed by Dennis Drabelle. Drabelle is mysteries editor of The Washington Post Book World.
            No shortcuts for John le Carre. The acknowledgments at the end of his splendid new novel indicate that in writing it he consulted experts on the Russian mafia, the Mumbai stock market, tennis, Swiss geography and several other topics. The guidance he received, combined with his longstanding knowledge of spycraft and the British Secret Service, makes for a tale that rings with authenticity at every stage.
            The protagonists are three: Perry Makepiece, an Oxford tutor on the verge of switching to the more demanding job of secondary-school teacher; his girlfriend, Gail Perkins, a young hotshot lawyer; and Dima, a loud, bearish Russian whom they meet while on holiday at a Caribbean tennis resort. Dima first challenges Perry to a match, then yanks the couple into his boisterous family circle, and finally divulges his ulterior motive in coming on so strong. He has been laundering money, a trade he would like to drop -- except that he knows so much, including facts that would incriminate a high official of the British government, that he believes his life is in danger. Surely, he presumes, an Oxford don and a rising barrister can put him in touch with the right parties to help him make a safe exit and put down new roots in England.
            And in fact, Dima has chosen well. Perry and Gail are indeed well-connected, and Dima's story captivates them both. Gail has another incentive for coming to his aid: her blooming friendship with Dima's troubled teenage daughter, Natasha. The action now shifts from Antigua to London, where Perry and Gail get a thorough grilling on exactly how the overture was made, what they think of Dima, and whether they are willing to continue serving as go-betweens. Their interrogators are Hector, a rogue agent who washed out of Her Majesty's employ some years back but has been rehired after making a fortune as an investment banker; and Luke, whose womanizing has nearly destroyed his career and for whom this case is a last chance to redeem himself.
            Le Carre supplies credible backgrounds and motives for all five main characters. Luke in particular exerts a complex appeal. His disgrace stems from his folly in sleeping with the boss' wife at his last overseas posting. Luke loves his own wife, wants to do well by his son, but has a habit of falling in love with attractive women, who tend to return the favor. Since Gail is a knockout, Luke must patrol his own libido while balancing Dima's demands against Britain's needs.
            Hector also bears watching. His bumptious candor can be disarming, as when he explains what's being asked of Perry and Gail: "Are you as a couple, attracted to the idea of doing something ... dangerous for your country, for virtually no reward except what is loosely called the honour of it, on the clear understanding that if you ever bubble about it ... we'll hound you to the ends of the earth?" But often Hector seems overly sure of himself, so hard-charging as to awaken forebodings in the reader.
            Le Carre pulls the various threads together cunningly. Hector and Luke must extract enough preliminary information from Dima to convince their superiors that he will be valuable to them; Dima has to worry about giving away too much before he's sure that he and his family will be given sanctuary; Perry and Gail have to keep both sides happy -- and Natasha complicates matters by getting pregnant and refusing to confide in anyone but Gail. Nonetheless, everything seems to be falling into place -- until the spy bureaucracy threatens to ruin the deal.
            Le Carre will turn 80 next year, and he's written a score of novels. Some of his later works have suffered from tendentiousness (his characters' objections to U.S. foreign policy can sedate even readers who agree). Perhaps his main fault as a novelist, however, has been a certain muddiness in the narration. The otherwise admirable "Absolute Friends" (2004) struck me that way: a novel in which the author's storytelling skills did not quite measure up to the depth of his vision. Happily, nothing of the kind mars "Our Kind of Traitor." There are no speeches or convolutions, not even when, toward the end, le Carre ratchets up the suspense by cutting quickly from Dima to his handlers to Perry and Gail. The denouement comes as a shock, but not an unjustified one.
            With so many other le Carre novels to compare this one with, one hesitates to give it a ranking. But if we narrow the time frame and widen the scope, I have no hesitation in saying this: If a better thriller than "Our Kind of Traitor" has been published this year, I'd like to see it.

            Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group

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