Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Saturday January 8, 2011
|
NEW IN PAPERBACK -- 'A Week at the Airport' and more
NA
NA
ISBN NA
NA pages
$NA
Reviewed by Nora Krug
The idea of reading a book about an airport while at the airport may sound cruel (or at the very least, redundant). But Alain de Botton's "A Week at the Airport" (Vintage, $15), about a week de Botton spent at Heathrow, offers the perfect dose of highbrow entertainment while you're waiting in a security line this holiday season. In fact, reading about the airport while at the airport is exactly the kind of philosophical jujitsu that intrigues de Botton, the writer behind literary self-help books like "How Proust Can Change Your Life" (1998) and the founder of the School of Life in London, where, among other things, you can hire a bibliotherapist to "create a reading prescription that's perfect for you." What a wickedly apt book this is for all of those holiday travelers stranded at airports.
In the summer of 2009, the chief executive of BAA, the corporation that runs Heathrow and several other major airports, hired de Botton to be the airport's first writer-in-residence. As such, he was confined to the facility for a week but was given full access to it -- from the bowels of baggage claim to the offices of British Airways' chief executive -- as well as a room at a nearby hotel. (But alas, no plane ticket.) The only stipulation was that he produce "an impressionistic survey" of the airport's newest terminal as a kind of literary marketing piece.
De Botton, who took a similar approach to the subject of travel in "The Art of Travel" (2004), is a master at finding the profound in the everyday. The airport offers him ample opportunity to display the best and worst of that skill. "The sky was a chemical orange colour, observing the final hours of the fragile curfew it had been keeping ever since it had swallowed up the last of the previous evening's Asia-bound flights," he waxes lyrically of an airport dawn. However, he can also sound a bit pretentious, as when a visit to a salon puts him in mind of a doleful Bach cantata and a meal at the British Airways business class restaurant leaves him quoting Adam Smith. Still, de Botton shines when he envisions the inner lives of strangers: He muses about a couple grieving over their pending separation and a father en route to a family vacation in Greece, where he won't be able to escape the ugly truths about "his own being, with its debilitating levels of fear, anxiety and wayward desire." He even gets inside the heads of the security staff, who, "like thriller writers ... were paid to imagine life as a little more eventful than it customarily manages to be."
Also of interest:
"Dorothea Lange" (Norton, $19.95), a biography by Linda Gordon, examines the famed documentary photographer, who "did not document her own life." Using photographs, interviews and other materials, Gordon tells the story of a woman who, though "hostile to 'feminism,'... nevertheless behaved like a feminist throughout her life."
From our previous reviews:
Despite its name, "The Autobiography of Fidel Castro" (Norton, $17.95) isn't actually an autobiography but a fictionalized memoir by Norberto Fuentes, who, according to Tom Miller, is a former Fidelista, now in exile, "who was privy to numerous private meetings and social engagements with Castro over the first 30 years of the regime." Fuentes, he writes, "has scooped heavyweight publishers and Castro himself, deftly mimicking the Cuban leader's voice, obsessions and outsize ego."
The novelist and memoirist Mary Gordon wrestles with her faith in "Reading Jesus" (Anchor, $15), a personal examination of the Gospels. Her critical exploration, Ron Charles wrote, "should appeal to anyone in that great multitude of thoughtful or lapsed Christians who feels the Scriptures growing stale and ossified."
Osama bin Laden's first wife and fourth son share their chilling, "inside-the-tent view" of the terrorist leader in "Growing Up Bin Laden" (St. Martin's Griffin, $15.99) an as-told-to memoir by Jean Sasson. Thomas W. Lippman called the book "repellent but oddly fascinating."
In "The Lexicographer's Dilemma" (Walker, $16), Jack Lynch, a professor of English at Rutgers, "gives us not a history of the English language but a history of those who have tried to make sense of it," noted Carolyn See. The result is "a history of human exasperation, frustration and free-floating angst."
Katharine Weber "skillfully weaves fact and fiction" in the novel "True Confections" (Broadway, $14), the tale of a candy-making family on the Lower East Side and beyond, according to Lisa Zeidner. Combining a history of candy-making with an astute domestic drama, Weber's book is both learned and "giddy fun."
"On Hallowed Ground" (Walker, $17), Robert M. Poole's history of Arlington National Cemetery, "succeeds grandly in giving voice to the more than 600 acres of what virtually all Americans consider sacred soil," wrote Fergus M. Bordewich.
Paul Rudnick, the screenwriter behind "In & Out" and "Addams Family Values," pokes fun at his New Jersey upbringing in "I Shudder" (It Books, $14.99), a memoir in essays that is "all Jewish-boy-made-good humor and heart," wrote Michael Lindgren.
Terry Teachout offers a thorough and lively portrait of Louis Armstrong in "Pops" (Mariner, $16.95), a "definitive" and "exceptional" biography of the jazz great, according to Louis Bayard.
Nora Krug writes our "New in Paperback" column every month. She can be reached at krugh(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
|
| Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top |
PADRE PIO: Miracles and Politics in a Secular Age
Sergio Luzzatto. Translated by Frederika Randall
Metropolitan
ISBN 978-0805089059
371 pages
$35
Reviewed by Justin Moyer
Since 90 percent of Italians are Catholic, a writer might be wary of publishing a scrupulously researched takedown of a popular Italian saint. Yet with "Padre Pio" -- the English translation of an exhaustive examination of the stigmatic priest Pio of Pietrelcina, who died in 1968 and was canonized in 2002 -- Sergio Luzzatto, a professor at the University of Turin, in effect does just that. "This study does not intend to establish once and for all whether Padre Pio's wounds were genuine stigmata, or whether the works he did were genuine miracles," he writes. Instead, Luzzato tackles the curious sociology of sainthood: the cult of personality that ignores what ostensibly holy men and women are and instead imagines what they could be.
With wry cynicism that's already inspired a backlash in Italy, Luzzatto spends much of his book unearthing the darker side of the man born Francesco Forgione, including his malingering during World War I, his cozy connection to Italian fascists, his questionable relationships with female congregants, and the possibility that his stigmata were self-inflicted. While posing worthwhile "questions about an icon's phenomenology, about a living saint's fame and the devout consumers of that celebrity," Luzzato playfully stops short of calling Pio a charlatan. "It had been the friar's job not only to perform miracles but to embody Christ," he writes. "That had been Padre Pio's brand image in the twentieth-century market of Christian faith." That brand apparently is in no danger from "Padre Pio," for the priest's legend is deeply honored across the globe from Italy to Landisville, N.J.
Justin Moyer can be reached at moyerj(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
|
| Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top |
|
|
 |
| Recent Stories |
 THE INSTRUCTIONS
UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS: A Story of Loss and Gain
DEAD LIKE YOU
JACKIE AS EDITOR: The Literary Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
LONG, LAST, HAPPY: New and Selected Stories |
|
|
|
|
|
| |
