Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Thursday March 31, 2011
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GRAPHIC NOVELS
NA
NA
ISBN NA
NA pages
$NA
Reviewed by Douglas Wolk
There are comics for every age, even the very youngest readers. Agnes Rosenstiehl's "Silly Lilly" books, about a playful little girl observing her environment, are brief, simple, incredibly sweet and thoroughly in line with the sensibilities of 3-year-olds for whom recognizing every word in a word balloon is a real accomplishment. "What Will I Be Today?" (Toon, $12.95) finds Lilly experimenting, over the course of a week, with roles she might assume someday. On Tuesday, for instance, she's a city planner: She finds a couple of concrete beams with some bugs on them, sets them upright and puts them together. "Here!" she declares. "Now we have a bug city."
The great kids' cartoonist John Stanley wrote (and sometimes drew) hundreds of comics from the 1940s to the '60s, most of which remained frustratingly out of print for decades. In the past couple of years, though, dozens of volumes of his work on "Little Lulu," "Melvin Monster" and other titles have appeared -- sometimes even in competing editions.
"Little Lulu's Pal Tubby: The Runaway Statue and Other Stories"  (Dark Horse; paperback, $15.99) collects frequently hilarious 1954-55 Stanley stories about a stout little boy with a sailor hat, his fantasy life (tiny men in a flying saucer lure him into adventures), and the social tensions that anticipate what he'll face later in life (the wealthy, spoiled Wilbur Van Snobbe is always making time with the little blonde girl Tubby likes).
"Tubby" (Drawn and Quarterly, $29.95) is a pricier, more elegantly designed hardcover that includes about two-thirds of the same material; it omits a piece involving ethnic stereotypes that has aged poorly, but duplicates the best stories from "The Runaway Statue," including a magnificently surreal farce in which Tubby wakes up with a moustache one morning and ends up in deep trouble because of it.
Before the Smurfs appeared in their familiar TV cartoon show (or their forthcoming movie), the little blue homunculi were the stars of a series of comics by the Belgian cartoonists Peyo and Yvan Delporte. "The Smurf King" (Papercutz; paperback, $5.99) is one of the earliest Smurf books, originally published in 1965: a sneaky, dryly nutty political satire. When Papa Smurf leaves town on business, the other Smurfs hold an election to figure out who's in charge. The winner, an ambitious fellow by the name of Smurf, sweeps into office on the strength of duplicitous campaign promises. He promptly crowns himself king. What follows is the inevitable progression of dictatorships: forced labor, the concentration of capital, extralegal imprisonments, revolutionary plots, counterrevolutionary crackdowns and ultimately "a horrible scene of smurficidal struggle," largely conducted via thrown tomatoes. Delporte and Peyo were writing for two audiences at once: Kids may see only the giddy adventure story, but their parents will catch the stinging wit beneath it.
A variety show about puppets isn't the most likely source material for great comics, but Roger Langridge is the rare cartoonist with a knack for both vaudeville-style gags and Jim Henson's signature character comedy. The latest collection of Langridge's work on the "Muppet Show Comic Book, Muppet Mash" (Boom Kids!; paperback, $9.99), is his riff on horror-movie cliches, and it's so dead-on it's like having another four great episodes of the old TV series. In one chapter, the perfectly named guest star Howlin' Jack Talbot displays disturbing lupine characteristics; in another, Dr. Bunsen Honeydew decides to transplant his assistant Beaker's brain into a giant robot. Mostly, though, these stories are an excuse for Langridge to fire off a barrage of sight gags, Borscht Belt puns and daffy sketches starring characters we almost never see from the waist down. He's got the Muppet's voices down perfectly, too. Here's the Swedish Chef on what to do about Gonzo, who everyone suspects has become a vampire: "Viggle vaggle in der faische mit der goeurlic broed! Mmm-hmm."
Nick Bertozzi's "Lewis & Clark"  (First Second; paperback, $16.99) is a treat for history-obsessed high schoolers: a roaring, knotty, digressive account of the 1804-06 expedition to the Pacific Coast that Meriwether Lewis and William Clark took on at Thomas Jefferson's behest.
Bertozzi's version downplays the idea of the Lewis & Clark expedition as a great adventure, despite a few jolting moments of danger (a couple of encounters with bears, a death-defying plunge down rapids). Instead, he suggests, their trip was a perpetual battle of attrition against nature, culture clashes, human frailty, ignorance and Lewis' personal demons. This is a gorgeous book, rendered in vivid, slashing black-and-white brush strokes, with imagery that relies on vivid swaths of negative space as much as on Bertozzi's gift for caricature and page design. It takes a bit of effort to piece together its barrage of incidents, but that's what exploration is all about.
Douglas Wolk is the author of "Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean."
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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THREE BOOKS ABOUT ATHEISM
Yvonne Zipp
NA
ISBN NA
NA pages
$NA
Reviewed by Yvonne Zipp
Despite the number of titles published since the "new atheists" took up their battle cry against religion with Sam Harris' "The End of Faith" in 2004, there is still no core, authoritative history -- no atheist's bible, if you will. The authors of three new books all cover the more recent history of atheism and agnosticism, although none attempts a definitive look at the subject. Two of them adopt a mostly scholarly stance, while the third makes it a personal quest, informed by some rare humility.
1. "In The Unbelievers: The Evolution of Modern Atheism" (Prometheus, $19), S.T. Joshi profiles 14 notable agnostics and atheists from the 19th and 20th centuries. He is up front about the fact that he's not trying to be encyclopedic and has chosen his subjects based on whether he "shares an intellectual sympathy with them." They are, by and large, a fascinating bunch, including Thomas Huxley, who first coined the term "agnosticism" in 1876; writer and curmudgeon Mark Twain; "America's greatest lawyer," Clarence Darrow; journalist H.L. Mencken ; and horror writer and "patron saint of atheism" H.P. Lovecraft. The lone woman, Madalyn Murray O'Hair, who took the fight to eliminate mandatory prayer in schools to the Supreme Court in 1963, "has always been a bit of an embarrassment to the atheist community," Joshi writes. "The Unbelievers" concludes with a look at the "new atheists": Sam Harris (Joshi is not a fan), Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Joshi has no patience for the religious. "Such individuals," he writes, "are free to think secretly that I am consigned to hell, just as I am free to feel silent contempt for their own irrationality and desperation." And while he claims that the battle is over and atheism has won, in the end "we may have to be satisfied with the peculiar dichotomy of an atheistic intellectual class, a wider class of the weakly religious, and an underclass of fundamentalists." Since 93 percent of Americans believe in God or a universal spirit, that's a pretty large underclass. In general, this book will be best received by those who share Joshi's -- excuse the term -- faith in that future.
2. If you're filled with rage at God, does that mean you believe in Him? That's the question at the heart of "Hating God: The Untold Story of Misotheism" (Oxford Univ., $29.95), by Bernard Schweizer, an English professor at Long Island University. After all, most of us don't waste energy railing at the failures and injustice of Zeus or Odin. Schweizer argues that certain agnostics and atheists belong in a separate class, which he dubs "misotheists." (I prefer Albert Camus' term: "metaphysical rebel.") Schweizer's premise is that misotheists -- such as Twain, Elie Wiesel , Rebecca West and Philip Pullman -- tend to work out their philosophical ideas through literature. Schweizer divides them into two categories: "agonistic misotheists," such as Wiesel and Zora Neale Hurston, who might want to believe in God but find it hard in the face of such earthly evil; and "absolute misotheists," such as Pullman, who find God "guilty of gross negligence." "Hating God" relies on close readings of selected texts, but Schweizer's insistence that his work is groundbreaking gets tiring. Still, I'd like to be in the room when Schwiezer informs Pullman that he actually believes in God.
3. Michael Krasny, an English professor at San Francisco State University and the host of the " Forum " public radio talk show, decries the polarized state of affairs between religious fundamentalists and militant atheists in "Spiritual Envy: An Agnostic's Quest"  (New World, $22.95). Krasny, who was raised by Jewish parents, quotes novelist Julian Barnes: "I don't believe in God but I miss him." Having lost his childhood faith in college, Krasny spent years forging his own personal code, including wisdom from everyone from Hemingway to Camus. "I wanted my own set of commandments, my own ethical code, my own personal morality, my own certainty, if I could find it, without the necessity of a divinely prescribed moral platform." Along the way, he makes a case for agnosticism as more than just "cowardly atheism" and for a return to tolerance. "One principle to which I have held fast is not to belittle or be contemptuous of the faith of others." He adds two provisos: as long as people do no harm in the name of their faith, and as long as they don't try to force their beliefs, or nonbeliefs, on him. His quest is a thoughtful journey well worth taking.
Yvonne Zipp frequently reviews books for The Washington Post.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE COMPANY WE KEEP: A Husband-and-Wife True-Life Spy Story
Robert Baer and Dayna Baer
Crown
ISBN 978-0307588142
305 pages
$26
Reviewed by Joseph Kanon, the author of "The Prodigal Spy" and, most recently, "Stardust"
Opposites don't always attract. More often, like goes to like. Bob Baer was a near-legendary CIA operative in the Middle East (later awarded a Career Intelligence Medal) with a reputation as a daredevil. Dayna Williamson was a rising agent in Protective Operations whose training (entertainingly described here) involved Glocks and shotguns, high-speed driving and how to kill someone "by shoving a pencil up through their hard palate." When they were both assigned to a mission in war-torn Sarajevo, sparks didn't fly immediately -- for one thing, there was a Hezbollah safe house to monitor and, for another, they were both married -- but in this affectionate dual memoir, they are so clearly made for each other that it was only a matter of time. A drive along the French Riviera, some hiking in the Swiss Alps -- one thing led to another. Can one find true love in the CIA? Apparently, yes.
"The Company We Keep" is a breezy, often fascinating account of this CIA romance, with tradecraft details and war stories thrown in to make it catnip for any fan of espionage fiction. Here, in fact, is the CIA that inspired such fiction in the first place -- not the Langley bureaucrats waiting out their pension time, but the risk-takers out on the edge. It's the kind of book that lends itself to casting the movie version as you read it. George Clooney has already played Bob ("Syriana" was based on Robert Baer's memoir "See No Evil"), and you can't do better than that. Dayna, reloading her Glock at 80 mph, is inevitably Angelina Jolie. And surely a star turn could be made out of Bob's irrepressible mother, Donna (she visits him on assignment in Tajikistan just to see it), if, say, Meryl Streep could be coaxed to play her. The cameo parts -- informants and Arab sheiks and Russian mobsters -- are a gold mine for character actors.
The fieldwork here is heady stuff, and "The Company We Keep" makes the most of it, but the back story is the emotional cost -- the estranged families, the friends left behind, the secrecy and months of separation. Both Baers had seen their first marriages crack under the stresses and were determined to make this one work. The obvious solution was to leave the agency in 1997 for civilian life. But how do you come in from the cold? The company the Baers kept, that clandestine world of ops and assassins and louche hangers-on, is the only one they had known -- rebooting in Beirut didn't help either -- and the second, even more interesting part of the book is about how they navigated their way back.
Eventually Bob became a best-selling author (and frequent media commentator), and the Baers settled in the United States and started a family. But initially they found they had left the CIA only to bring it with them -- the same shadowy world, the same operational instincts, the same occasional danger. Material is elided or hurried over; there are iffy consulting jobs (an Argentine oil company wanting to build a pipeline through Afghanistan); old contacts who refuse to believe that the Baers have really left the game; and even assassination proposals (turned down). Meanwhile, the book features so many characters up to no good that at times the entire Middle East seems like Somerset Maugham's famous description of the Riviera: "a sunny place for shady people."
That the Baers coaxed a happy ending out of all this is not the least remarkable part of their appealing story, and hats off to them. But now one can't help wondering about other retired spooks and what company they're keeping these days.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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HOW TO LIVE: Or, A Life of Montaigne In One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer
HOW TO LIVE: Or, A Life of Montaigne In One Question and Twenty Attempts at an AnswerSarah Bakewell
Other
ISBN 978-1590514252
389 pages
$25
WHEN I AM PLAYING WITH MY CAT, HOW DO I KNOW THAT SHE IS NOT PLAYING WITH ME?: Montaigne and Being in Touch with LifeSaul Frampton
Pantheon
ISBN 978-0375424717
300 pages
$26
Reviewed by Michael Dirda, who reviews books for The Washington Post every Thursday. Visit his online book discussion at washingtonpost.com/readingroom.
Suppose that Earth was invited to join the Intergalactic Congress of Planets, and its chair-being, Zinglos-Atheling, wanted to know more about our strange species. What one person in history would you choose to best represent humanity? On the one hand, Socrates and Jesus are a bit too saintly (or more than saintly) to be wholly representative; on the other, Charlie Sheen and Lindsay Lohan are, as the saying goes, all too human.
You could hardly go wrong by picking Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), the subject of these two excellent books. This French nobleman retired to his book-lined tower in his late 30s and spent the next 20 years in self-scrutiny, gradually revealing more about himself than anyone had ever done before. His essays -- Montaigne originated the genre -- discuss philosophies of life, quote widely from the ancients and are full of anecdotes from Plutarch, but they also tell us that their author is short, suffers terribly from kidney stones and wishes he didn't have such a small penis. Above all else, Montaigne celebrates life in all its glorious messiness, while reminding us that nothing matters more than human connectedness and kindness to people and animals.
An endlessly digressive writer, Montaigne is as much raconteur as moralist, and his book offers some of the best after-dinner conversation in the world. You can never be sure what this French humanist will say next. The innocuous-sounding "On Some Lines of Virgil" isn't about Latin poetry; it's about sex and eroticism. His greatest single essay -- and his last -- bears the majestic title "On Experience." In it, Montaigne reminds us that no matter how high our social status, we all still sit on our own bottoms.
Sarah Bakewell's "How to Live," which first appeared last fall to deserved acclaim, has a slight tendency to longwindedness, and its chapter titles verge on the irritatingly cutesy (e.g., "How to live? Do a good job, but not too good a job"). No matter. The book is packed with useful information: Bakewell clarifies the nature of stoicism and scepticism, looks into the lives of Montaigne's parents, his wife and his adopted daughter, Marie de Gournay (who first edited the essays), and examines closely Montaigne's famous friendship with Etienne de La Boetie. Asked to explain why he cared so much for his friend, Montaigne could only say: "Because it was him; because it was me." No better definition of love has yet appeared. All in all, "How to Live" touches on every aspect of Montaigne's thought, life and influence, and culminates in a fascinating chapter on the complicated textual history of the "Essays."
In the end, Bakewell concludes that Montaigne's greatest lesson is that "life should be an aim unto itself, a purpose unto itself" and that our troubled 21st century "could use his sense of moderation, his love of sociability and courtesy, his suspension of judgment, and his subtle understanding of the psychological mechanisms involved in confrontation and conflict."
Saul Frampton's "When I Am Playing with My Cat, How Do I Know That She Is Not Playing with Me?" takes its Zen-like title from another of Montaigne's most famous observations. Compared with "How to Live," Frampton's is a much tighter and more elegant work, a series of historical and critical essays rather than a biography. (For a good straightforward life, the reader will still want Donald M. Frame's classic "Montaigne.") Where Frampton excels is in his sharply intelligent and sharply phrased insights: The basic human condition, he notes, is "one of grogginess and uncertainty." Who could argue with that? Montaigne, he observes, endlessly amplifies and polishes his essays until they "grow from simple distractions into a way of replaying, rewinding, and reliving his life as he lives it."
Throughout, Frampton approaches Montaigne from unexpected tangents. One of his chapters likens the writer's friendship with La Boetie to a double-portrait by Holbein, another brings home the bloodthirstiness of the contemporary wars of religion and the essayist's quite reasonable fear that he might be slaughtered in his bed, and still another points out that Montaigne's estate produced wine and that the word "essay" can be translated as a sampling or tasting. Hence the author's great book could be called "Tastes by Michel de Montaigne" or "Tastes of Michel de Montaigne."
To understand Montaigne's emphasis on the human need for touch, Frampton turns to proxemics, the "anthropology of people's relationship to each other in space" and kinesics, "what their movements and gestures reveal." Fundamentally, he emphasizes, Montaigne "is preoccupied with what the link between our minds and our bodies can tell us about the nature of mankind more generally." Human presence, human proximity "is thus at the heart of morality" and "the basis of happiness itself." For Montaigne, says Frampton, friends are simply "people that you go and see."
Like his father, the essayist suffered from kidney stones, that most excruciatingly painful of ailments, and one that ultimately killed him. Only one of Montaigne's six children lived to adulthood. Civil war raged all around him. Yet Montaigne never surrendered to despair. Even "the stone," as Frampton shows, helped him better appreciate "what it is to be." As Montaigne writes: "Is there anything sweeter than the sudden change when, after extreme pain, by ejecting the stone I recover, in a flash of lightning, the beautiful light of health, so free and so full?" This is how we should always savor our lives. But more often than not, says Montaigne, "we are never at home, we are always beyond ourselves. Fear, desire, hope, still push us on toward the future, and deprive us of the feeling and consideration of that which is, to distract us with the thought of what will be, even when we shall be no more."
Orson Welles once declared Montaigne "the greatest writer of any time, anywhere." Certainly the wise reader will use Bakewell and Frampton as springboards into the essays themselves. Almost any translation will do, whether John Florio's florid Elizabethan classic or the sensitive modern versions of Frame and Michael Screech. When we look into Montaigne's "Essays," we find ourselves.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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