"The Memory Palace," "Heat Wave," more

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Washington Post Book Reviews For You Friday February 4, 2011 ANDREW MARVELL: The Chameleon Nigel Smith Yale University Press ISBN 978-0300112214 400 pages $45 Reviewed by Michael Dirda, who reviews books every Thursday for The Washington Post In 1921, T.S. Eliot, commemorating the tercentenary of Andrew Marvell's birth, coyly referred to the poet as "the former member for Hull" -- that is, Parliament's representative from the provincial city of Hull. Eliot wasn't simply being cute. While most of us think of Marvell (1621-1678) as the author of the best seduction poem in the English language, he was known to his contemporaries as a private tutor, a hardworking civil servant and an occasional diplomatic emissary (to Holland and Russia). He was also quite probably a secret agent. "To His Coy Mistress," "The Garden," "Upon Appleton House" and his three or four other familiar masterpieces weren't even published until 1681, three years after his death. Nigel Smith, a professor of English at Princeton University, is Marvell's editor in the invaluable Longman's Annotated English Poets series, and he has certainly mastered everything that can be learned about this elusive, shadowy and very private man. While Smith expresses the hope that his biography will "make Marvell known to the widest possible readership," his isn't an easy task, given a paucity of personal anecdote and the fact that the poems most people care about are those Marvell wrote in his 20s or early 30s. The last 25 years of his life were largely devoted to government work and occasional verse satires on the politics of the day. As a result, "Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon" focuses throughout on the distant politics of 17th-century England and on Marvell's reactions to it, whether in his public career or in his private writing. The son of a clergyman, the poet started off a royalist, spent much of the civil war abroad, welcomed Oliver Cromwell (while showing sympathy and admiration for the doomed Charles I, who was beheaded in 1649), and ultimately worked closely as an assistant to the protectorate's secretary of foreign tongues: none other than John Milton, who by that point in his life had gone blind. When Cromwell died, it is said that Marvell, Milton and John Dryden walked together in the funeral cortege. Following the restoration of the monarchy, Marvell served in Parliament, published religious and political pamphlets, including "An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England" (1677), and eventually died poor. A Mary Marvell, nee Palmer and possibly his former landlady, dubiously claimed to be his widow. Smith is open to this possibility, in part because Marvell's sexuality was distinctly heterodox. Misogyny and pedophilia have been detected in some of his poems, but so have hints of homosexuality (reinforced by contemporary rumors). The satirical poet Samuel Butler even implied that some kind of genital accident left Marvell a eunuch. No one knows for sure. As Smith writes, Marvell "had few friends and generally did not trust people. He liked drinking but would not drink in company." As Washingtonians know, public responsibilities sometimes require not only discretion but also secrecy and the maintenance of a low profile. Still, there are signs that this lifelong civil servant felt frustrated and disappointed, was subject to jealousy and sneering, and regarded himself as fundamentally an outsider. Little wonder that Marvell's verse often leaves us unsure of where he and we stand, distinguished as it is by ambiguities, ironies and a liking for what the ancients called "concordia discors" (dissonant harmony). To the common view of Marvell as a somewhat Olympian figure, incorruptible and patriotic, Smith suggests that his poetry might have resulted from "a brilliant sublimation of a set of social and sexual confusions and frustrations." Eliot regarded Marvell as the product of European -- that is to say Latin -- culture, neatly defining his wit as "a tough reasonableness beneath the slight lyric grace." An early Marvell poem such as "On a Drop of Dew" employs the elaborate metaphysical conceits we associate with John Donne; the "Dialogue Between the Soul and Body" -- a very Yeatsian title -- depicts "a Soul hung up, as 'twere, in Chains/Of Nerves, and Arteries, and Veins." In "The Definition of Love," Marvell dramatically announces that his love "was begotten by despair/Upon Impossibility." "The Garden" contains the famous couplet "Annihilating all that's made/To a Green Thought in a Green Shade," and "An Horatian Ode Upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland" hauntingly tells us that Cromwell's destiny was to bring about Charles I's downfall and so "to ruin the great Work of Time." All these are famous lines. But in any rereading of Marvell's poetry one regularly discovers striking passages in unexpected works, such as this opening to "The First Anniversary of the Government under O.C." in which human life is likened to one long act of drowning: So Man, declining always, disappears In the weak Circles of increasing Years; And his short Tumults of themselves Compose, While flowing Time above his Head does close. While "Upon Appleton House" may be Marvell's most sustained poem, it is overlong for most modern tastes, being composed of descriptions of a country estate with Horatian reflections on rural ease, coupled with advice to its owner, Lord Fairfax, and a look to the future of his little daughter Mary, for whom Marvell was employed as a tutor. Perhaps only in "To His Coy Mistress" did Marvell avoid both obscurities and longeurs and get everything precisely right. From its opening "Had we but World enough, and Time," it presents the "carpe diem" theme with syllogistic inexorability. The first strophe describes how the lover would be happy to praise his mistress from the beginning to the end of time: "My vegetable Love should grow/Vaster than Empires, and more slow." Alas, as he says in the next section, "at my back I always hear/Time's winged chariot hurrying near/and yonder all before us lie/Deserts of vast eternity." In short, "the Grave's a fine and private place/But none I think do there embrace." Only one logical deduction is possible: "Now, therefore," the speaker concludes, as the poem grows faster and more intense, "while thy willing Soul transpires/At every pore with instant Fires,/Now let us sport us while we may." Instead of surrendering to time's ravages, "let us roll all our strength, and all/Our sweetness, up into one Ball; and tear our Pleasures with rough strife,/Through the Iron gates of Life." Love-making's joy is, finally, both thrillingly brutal and ecstatic. Such poetry appeals directly to almost anyone's emotions and experience, but much of Marvell's other writing is far more deeply grounded in his own time. For such fine but distinctly historical work most readers will need some help, and Smith, whether in his annotated edition of Marvell's poems or in this critical biography, is the man to see. Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top THE MEMORY PALACE Mira Bartok Free Press ISBN 978-1439183311 305 pages $25 Reviewed by Reeve Lindbergh Mira Bartok's disturbing, beautiful book about her mother's schizophrenia takes its title from the teachings of a 16th-century Jesuit priest, Matteo Ricci, who helped Chinese scholars safeguard their memories by associating a specific image with each memory, then assigning each image a place in a room in the mind. In this way one could build, room by room, an imaginary palace filled with real memories. "The Memory Palace" is not so much a palace of memories as a complex web of bewitching verbal and visual images, memories, dreams, true stories and rambling excerpts from the author's mentally ill mother's notebooks. It is an extraordinary mix. Myra and Rachel Herr grew up in Cleveland with their divorcee mother, Norma, a brilliant pianist who loved all the arts and took her children to concerts and museums during her lucid moments. Yet the early parts of Bartok's book read like a good child's nightmare. It did not matter how hard she tried, how many hours she practiced the piano, how impressive her grades were. Her mother might show up on a bicycle at school and circle the building, ringing the bicycle bell and calling out "Where are my children? Someone has kidnapped my children!" She might hear voices and have conversations with people who were not there, or spin in circles in the living room, holding a butcher's knife. Myra and Rachel's grandmother called the hospital when Norma's schizophrenic episodes became extreme, but felt deeply ashamed whenever the ambulance arrived. ("What will the neighbors say now?") After the girls grew up and their grandfather died, Norma lived with the grandmother, though Norma's illness continued and at 80 the older woman began to show signs of Alzheimer's. When Norma stabbed their grandmother six times with a knife, Myra and Rachel legally removed the grandmother to a private elder-care facility, but the daughters were unable to have their mother placed where she, too, would receive appropriate treatment; Norma was not considered "incompetent." Nonetheless, she attacked Myra with a broken bottle, slicing her throat. She tried to choke Rachel on the street. Finally both girls changed their names (to Mira and Natalia, respectively) and fled, leaving their mother with just the mailing address of a friend. They were estranged from Norma for 17 years, until they were called to her deathbed. Mira Bartok, a prolific author of books for children, lived with anguishing guilt during the years of separation, always yearning to help her mother, who was homeless and alone. The danger of contact seemed too great right up to the end of Norma's life: "Even though she was now elderly," Bartok writes of her mother, dying of cancer in the hospital at 81, "in my mind she was still the madwoman on the street, brandishing a knife; the woman who shouts obscenities at you in the park, who follows you down alleyways, lighting matches in your hair." Some of the images in the book are terrifying, but the writing is intimate and exquisite, with sentences and paragraphs worth reading and re-reading just to savor the words. The author describes a childhood marked by trauma -- the schizophrenic mother, the father who abandoned the family, the grandfather who hit them with his belt and threatened them with his gun -- and adulthood as an artist and a writer whose life continued to be overshadowed by her mother's illness. Bartok often writes of her mother's schizophrenia in the language of myth and magic, as if to cloak the incomprehensible in some form of understanding: "In her story there are leopards on every corner, men with wild teeth and cat bodies, tails as long as rivers. If she opens her arms into wings she must cross a bridge of fire, battle four horses and riders. I am a swan, a spindle, a falcon, a bear." This effort is deeply touching, as is Mira and Natalia's belief that, at the end with their weak and dying mother, they have retrieved "her sweet essence that not even schizophrenia could take away." However agonizing the relationship with their mother was, and surely would have continued to be had she lived, at her death her daughters salvaged a stubborn, abiding love for Norma in spite of everything. It is hard to imagine a more poignant tribute. Reeve Lindbergh has written a number of books for children and adults, including "Forward From Here: Leaving Middle Age and Other Unexpected Adventures." Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top HEAT WAVE: The Life and Career of Ethel Waters Donald Bogle Harper ISBN 978-0061241734 624 pages $26.99 Reviewed by Wil Haygood Toward the end of her beguiling life, the one-time vaudevillian Ethel Waters was schlepping around small college campuses. She was performing the Carson McCullers drama "The Member of the Wedding," which had brought her fame many years earlier on Broadway. But this was now the '60s, and Waters -- in her own 60s -- was a mysterious figure to many, an obese woman with a vicious temper who moonlighted with evangelist Billy Graham's traveling revivals. She had purposely distanced herself from the civil rights movement. The black college kids, in love with their rising cultural pride, wanted nothing to do with her during her campus tours. The white kids thought her an intriguing relic from the past. In 1972, Waters had been introduced to an audience as a legendary "black" performer. "Please, not the word 'Black,'" she said. "I'm a Negress and proud of it." Waters, whose career spanned radio, Broadway, musical recordings, TV and film, has long demanded a major assessment. Donald Bogle's "Heat Wave" goes a long way toward putting her career in perspective and detailing her tortuous and enigmatic journey. She was born on Halloween in 1896 in Chester, Pa., her birth a result of the rape of her teenage mother. While growing up, Waters became fond of music and musicians. It would be the way to escape poverty. "In time," writes Bogle, "Ethel got to see performers like the Whitman Sisters, the comedy duo Butterbeans and Susie, dancer Alice Ramsey, the ventriloquist Johnny Woods, and the great blues singer Ma Rainey." It was her education. She watched, she imitated, she learned. Her voice was mature, and her stage presence aggressively sexy. (Waters never was a classic beauty like Lena Horne or Dorothy Dandridge, but in the old show-business adage, she worked well with what she possessed.) In time, Waters made her way to Baltimore, where she joined the lively Negro vaudeville circuit under the umbrella of the Theatre Owners Booking Association. It was an amalgamation of businessmen and hucksters who sent black performers throughout the country. Performers had another name for the group: Tough on Black Actors. The theater owners could be crooks, the pay paltry, the hours long and cruel. But Waters was nothing if not a hard worker. Harlem was a mecca for black entertainers, but it was also risky for newcomers. "There was too much Negro talent around," Bogle -- the author of, among other books, "Dorothy Dandridge" and "Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams: The Story of Black Hollywood" -- tells us of that Harlem. Waters stormed Harlem. She waltzed into the offices of Black Swan records in 1921. They liked her style. On show billings, she was referred to as "Sweet Mama Stringbean." She traveled with the Black Swan Jazz Masters and a lesbian lover. (A brief marriage had gone bust.) Onlookers gawked as she galloped atop a horse through Central Park. She was becoming one of the highest-paid Negro performers. She made it to Broadway in "Blackbirds of 1930." The show flopped, but theatergoers would remember her singing, especially the song "My Handy Man Ain't Handy No More," whose lyrics included: "He don't perform his duties like he used to do /... He says he isn't lazy, claims he isn't old / But still he sits round and lets my stove get cold." Mae West had nothing on Ethel Waters. But every success Waters had she seemed to undermine. She cursed managers. She had lovers' spats that ended up in the tabloids. Domestic chaos was always at hand. She operated, certainly, in a racist environment. But charm was not her metier, as it was Lena Horne's. During rehearsal for a play, Waters confided: "I'm still a mite savage, I guess. Maybe there's real craziness in me. I'll say things I don't mean. I can't help it." Her Hollywood foray was as dispiriting as every other black entertainer's at the time. "Generally," says Bogle, in wicked understatement, "Hollywood did not know what to do with its Black glamour goddesses." Here Bogle clearly becomes too enamored of his subject: Ethel Waters was no glamour goddess. She performed well in "Cabin in the Sky" but did not, as Bogle proclaims, steal the movie. The newcomer Lena Horne did. Waters was mighty fine on-screen in "The Member of the Wedding." Her signature songs live on, among them "Am I Blue" and "St. Louis Blues." But the ending of her life is all too familiar. There were troubles with the IRS. Then health problems because of her weight. There were appearances in forgettable episodic TV dramas: that old lady sitting over there waiting on her cue. Those who lived on higher ledges were never to her liking. "Though she could appreciate the attention of nobility," Bogle tells us, "she would always respond most to others like herself who crawled out of the pit, be it an economic or emotional one, and made a name or place for themselves." One finishes this overlong chronicle wishing that Bogle had cracked the question of her mixed emotions about her race. It would also have been enlightening if he had delved deeper into her relationship with Billy Graham's crusading. Much of it, one is led to believe, comes down to the fact that entertainers are needy souls; they wish to be loved. Happy and functional romantic relationships seemed to have been beyond Waters' grasp. Upon meeting Eleanor Roosevelt, Waters said, "Mrs. Roosevelt, please hug me." But Donald Bogle has wrapped the life of Ethel Waters in empathy, and that is no small achievement. Wil Haygood, a national reporter for The Washington Post, is the author of three biographies, the latest of which is "Sweet Thunder: The Life and Times of Sugar Ray Robinson." He can be reached at haygoodw(at symbol)washpost.com. Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top Advertisement Congratulations...Your Chance To Cash In! Free $1,000 CostCo Gift Card   * Use at any CostCo location   * Works the same as cash - never expires   * Get the latest Toys and Gifts   * Groceries, Furniture, Tools...   * HDTV Or A New Computer... Click And Claim Yours! 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"Pictures of You," The Diviner's Tale," more

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Washington Post Book Reviews For You Thursday February 3, 2011 PICTURES OF YOU Caroline Leavitt Algonquin ISBN 978-1565126312 335 pages $13.95 Reviewed by Carolyn See, who reviews books for The Washington Post every Friday This thoughtful novel brings up a problem all of us have to deal with in the course of our lives, unless we're lucky enough to sneak through existence without encountering misfortune of any kind. We all like to think that we're decent people, surrounded by people of equally good character. We're fond of telling those in trouble, "Remember, I'm here for you." Or, "If there's anything I can do ..." We say these things and hear them all the time, and yet the world is full of folks who can't or won't be there for us. And we don't find that out until we look to them for help and all we see is a big empty space. Worse yet, sometimes those missing persons turn out to be us. "Pictures of You" focuses on two families that manage to meet in the worst possible way -- through a fatal car crash. April and Isabelle, two wives in their 30s, who live six blocks away from each other, happen to choose this particular day to run away from their marriages. Isabelle is justified in her decisive departure; her husband's girlfriend has just called her up and announced that she's pregnant. But April's story is a little more murky. Her son, Sam, who is 9 and has severe asthma, is in the car with her at the time of the accident. She brought a suitcase for her but not for him. And after the accident, Sam won't talk about what happened on the morning before his mother died. The day was foggy, the road deserted, and April's car was stopped and pointed in the wrong direction when Isabelle ran into it. But their small-town newspaper has a field day describing the event, and Isabelle is portrayed as the next-best thing to a murderess. Isabelle finds herself back in her Cape Cod home town, while Luke -- that philandering husband of hers -- has it both ways, keeping up relationships with his girlfriend and his wife. Isabelle is traumatized. She's terrified to go out in public because of the contemptuous looks she gets. She can't bear to get into a car. Above all, she can't come to terms with the fact that she's taken a human life, however inadvertently. Then, as the weeks and months slowly pass, she finds herself more or less stalking the remnants of the family she has accidentally destroyed -- April's husband, Charlie Nash, and Sam, his young asthmatic son. Asthma -- and the complications of that or any other childhood disability -- is a central theme here. Asthma has already taken a terrible toll on Sam's family. He's has been in and out of hospitals all his life; he's been in oxygen tents; he's been mercilessly bullied in school. April had been a devoted -- if difficult -- mom, doing everything she can to keep him happy and healthy. Isabelle feels drawn to grief-stricken Sam, who somehow gets the impression that she might be an angel sent by God to reunite him with his mother. Charlie, his dad, is an extremely believable portrait of a man utterly paralyzed by life. He sleeps with Isabelle but won't say he loves her. When Isabelle gets a little cranky about the situation, he presents her with an untenable set of demands: He wants her to stay in town and be available to him, but he wants to keep their affair a secret. His excuse? Sam's illness. "How can I promise you anything? I just have to take things moment by moment right now. Please -- we need you here. I need you." Like Isabelle's philandering husband, Luke, he's trying to have everything, without giving anything of his own away. The fact that he keeps his affection for Isabelle a secret from Sam (who's crazy about her already) is madness, but people do crazy things all the time. (And the plot hasn't even started yet.) Leavitt had asthma as a child, and "Pictures of You" revolves around the trials that childhood illness presents to the adult world. What can be done? How can people help? The pages here are full of professionals who don't do their jobs, classmates who behave like monsters, and even Charlie, who's so afraid to do anything about his son that he may ruin Sam's life. But of course we know people try to do the right thing all the time, but often fail. This is a novel that invites us to look at our own imperfections, not the dramatic crimes, but the niggling little sins of omission that so often render our lives tragically undernourished and small. Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top Djibouti: A Novel Elmore Leonard Morrow ISBN 978-0061735172 279 pages $26.99 Reviewed by Anna Mundow, a literary columnist for the Boston Globe and a contributor to the Irish Times Elmore Leonard, at 85, is unlikely to be described as writing at the height of his powers, and that fact must surely make this master of irony smile. Indeed, in his new adventure novel, "Djibouti," Leonard casts an amused eye on male aging and on male vanity, a weakness that he has lethally skewered in his fiction for decades. "It's too bad you're an old man," says filmmaker Dara Barr, flirting with 72-year-old Xavier LeBo, her longtime assistant from New Orleans. They're in Djibouti, a tiny country in the Horn of Africa, to make a documentary about Somali pirates. Dara is a familiar Leonard character, the hot ticket with brains (and, in this case, a strong resemblance to real-life film director Kathryn Bigelow). But it is Xavier's world-weary eyes that take in every detail on this alien African terrain crowded with terrorists and assorted criminals. Soon he and Dara meet the swaggering pirates who make millions hijacking ships, "the bad boys with AKs and ... rockets," as Xavier describes them. "I said to one of 'em I'm talkin to in a club last night, 'You always high you out to sea?' The man say, 'If we not drunk, what are we doin in a skiff and think we can seize an oil tanker?'" The pirate story seems an odd one for Leonard: too big, too exotic and too political. But grifters, it turns out, are grifters whatever the scam, and Leonard portrays some doozies here. In the early chapters, though, the action is muted as Dara and Xavier review the footage they've shot offshore among the pirates. Leonard cleverly shifts back and forth between what Dara is viewing on her computer and what actually happened as she filmed. This cleverness wears thin, however, and we begin to fear that Leonard, like Xavier, is a little in love with Dara. Fortunately, other engaging characters materialize: Billy, the Texas billionaire who is sailing the world with his test-wife, Helene; Harry, the shady, Oxford-educated, half-Saudi investigator for the International Maritime Organization; Idris, a strutting pirate captain; and Qasim, an al-Qaeda leader. But Leonard's voice seems absent, and we miss it. Then, midway through the novel, there it is: "Before he was Jama Raisuli or Jama al Amriki he was James Russell, pronounced Russell: picked up twice on suspicion of armed robbery and released. ... This was how James Russell came to Coleman FCI in the middle of inland Florida to hang with Muslims, a means of surviving in here, twenty years old doing his first fall." From the moment James appears, Leonard's pirates and terrorists and even Dara herself seem to fade by comparison. An instantly recognizable type from numerous Leonard novels -- the sharp, funny, ruthless operator -- James is nevertheless fresh. He converts to Islam in jail, to al-Qaeda on the outside, and meets his hero, Qasim, in Djibouti. "I'm known to rob banks," James tells the legendary terrorist, "when I don't have nothing to do." Now, James has memorized the cell phone number he can use to detonate the liquefied gas tanker hijacked by Idris and his pirate gang. That's if Billy, the Texas billionaire, doesn't get there first. A caper, then, is what we have, one that more closely resembles a heist action movie than it does "Get Shorty," "Cat Chaser" or any other Leonard crime novel. There is a political context, certainly, and plenty of information on the mechanics and economics of modern-day piracy, but reading about all that feels like treading water while we wait for the big boom. Nevertheless, the fact that James Russell is more riveting than any havoc he may wreak proves just how deft -- and surprising -- a writer Leonard still is. Here violence arrives unannounced and stone cold. One of James' victims, for example, "turned his head and Jama shot him where you would shoot yourself if you saw it was that time, in the temple." When James briefly ensnares a naive American homosexual, what follows is appallingly brutal, yet James, like so many of Leonard's memorable villains, remains disconcertingly engaging. And as his path converges with that of Xavier and Dara, the flirtation between the young filmmaker and her aging sidekick becomes something far more powerful than either one expects. In "Djibouti," Leonard slyly shows us what the old man can still do. Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top DANIEL Henning Mankell. Translated from the Swedish by Steven T. Murray New Press ISBN 978-1595581938 279 pages $26.95 Reviewed by David Anthony Durham, the author of five novels, most recently "The Other Lands" A recent NPR piece focused on a troubling aspect of the trend called "orphanage tourism." The story was about Westerners who spend their holidays with HIV-positive orphans in South Africa. To the tourists, these visits are life-affirming acts of charity in which they are touched by their interactions with unfortunate children. Critics question who is really benefiting the most from this practice. Are these Westerners bringing glimpses of love and hope? Or are they assuaging guilt at the children's expense? Judging by his new historical novel, "Daniel," Henning Mankell would say it's both. And it's not a new conundrum. The novel (published in Swedish in 2000) opens with the discovery of the body of a murdered girl in rural Sweden in the 1870s. That may be familiar material for Mankell, who has about 30 million crime novels in print, but it's mostly a device to hook reader interest. This story is driven by the author's humanitarian concerns, which have become more and more a feature of his work. The story really starts with Hans Bengler, a man at a loss for what to do with his life. He aspires to be a doctor, but after fainting at his first autopsy, he dumps that idea. He considers a military career, but "he had a low tolerance for pain, he wasn't particularly strong, and he was scared of loud noises." He dabbles in religion, but decides against being a pastor because of his belief that "there was no god." While Bengler masturbates in the shade of a tree one afternoon, a butterfly lands on his hand, and he has a revelation: He'll journey to some far off country and find an insect unknown to science. He chooses the Kalahari Desert, and off he goes. Decisive action? A man with a plan ready to manifest his destiny? Not so much. By his own estimation, he's a person "who didn't believe in anything, who didn't really want anything, who in a manifestation of the utmost vanity was looking for a fly that he could name after himself." You'd think Africa would eat him alive, but luckily for him, he's a European in a subjugated continent. His whiteness affords him almost foolproof advantages. A fellow countryman puts it this way: "It's common for Europeans who weren't good enough to come to Africa. Here they can assert their skin colour. ... Don't have to be able to do anything." That's pretty much Bengler, except that he wants to believe he's better than his fellow countrymen. When he comes across a caged San boy whose nomadic family has been slaughtered, he claims the boy, names him Daniel and takes him back to Sweden, along with his boxes of insects. Mankell describes this journey with melancholic prose that's unlikely to leave anyone breathless with appreciation. Though his language can be dreary, he's always asking the reader to see the irony beneath its surface. If Bengler's actions with Daniel are benevolent, why do they look like kidnapping and enslavement, with bound hands and locked doors and passage on a slave ship? If Daniel is a means for Bengler to find humanity and purpose in his life, why do his actions toward the boy increasingly rest on lies, exploitation and violence? Bengler seems to be the character whom Mankell is most comfortable with -- his intimate understanding of this man's complex, self-deluding nature feels almost confessional -- but most of the book follows Daniel's point of view. For him, Sweden is a foreign world full of drunks, thick forests and icy fields. He feels not so much saved from a horrible fate as inexplicably separated from his loved ones' spirits and left more impoverished because of it. Mankell describes the boy with compassion but not with much cultural specificity. San Bushmen are one of mankind's most ancient ethnic groups, with complex spiritual lives and community structures. Mankell doesn't really capture that through Daniel's perspective. He keeps our attention focused on the boy's attempts to control his fate. Will Daniel get back to Africa? Can he learn to walk on water, as he believes he can? Will Bengler be a villain or a savior by the end? When the murdered girl from the prologue finally enters the story again, one wonders how she ended up dead and what Daniel had to do with it. I was eager to find out, and I turned the pages briskly. That said, don't read "Daniel" for the plot. This is not one of Mankell's popular Wallander mysteries. Read it instead for his ruminations on a cultural divide that Bengler and Daniel cannot cross. Even the supporting characters are trapped by the legacy of race, power and exploitation upon which colonialism was founded. The plucky female journalist who befriends Daniel, the pastor who dreams of missionary work in Africa, the kind husband and wife who attempt to understand the boy, even the king of Sweden in his pleasure yacht: All of them try to help, but most of them end up as unwitting participants in a deepening tragedy. Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top THE DIVINER'S TALE Bradford Morrow Houghton Mifflin Harcourt ISBN 978-0547382630 311 pages $26 Reviewed by Gerald Bartell, an arts and travel writer in Manhattan The words "gentle" and "quiet" are seldom used to describe a contemporary thriller, but they're apt terms for what works best in Bradford Morrow's "The Diviner's Tale." Here is a work in which no buildings explode, no one gets stabbed in the throat and no bang-up finish takes up the final 50 pages. Instead, Morrow, also the author of "Ariel's Crossing," "Giovanni's Gift" and other novels, elicits frissons with gossamer descriptions of still moments that will have some readers drawing a sharp breath, as if they've heard a strange noise in the house. Consider the moment when Cassandra Brooks, the story's narrator, visits a deserted cemetery - deserted, at least, by anyone living: "Some pine boughs scythed the air, though there was no breeze to push them. ... (A) noise followed ... a pebble plucking its way across the earth behind me like a skipped stone but on dewy grass instead of flat water." Later, Cassandra eyes a stalker outside her home. What she sees -- like many other dark, lyrical descriptions of nature in the book - suggests that Morrow may have been influenced by "The Night of the Hunter," a novel by Davis Grubb, and its film version directed by Charles Laughton: "I ... peered down into the front yard. There was a figure under the tree. Leaning against the trunk, looking up in the leaf-shuddering darkness. The tiny burning tip of the cigarette flared orange as the man ... took a drag." Unfortunately, the beautifully described background in "The Diviner's Tale" beguiles the reader far more than does the action in its foreground. Morrow's plotting, moving at a too steady tempo and populated by some rather bland characters, is not always mesmerizing, despite promising subject matter. Like her father, Cassandra is a "diviner," a person who experiences visions of the future and of what is hidden from the sight of others. She recalls at the outset that her first and most traumatic premonition occurred at age 7, when she warned her 14-year-old brother, Christopher, not to join friends driving to a movie. Christopher laughed off her fears, only to die that night in a car crash. A grown woman and a single mother of twins as the story begins, Cassandra finds that fellow residents of her rural Upstate New York hometown tend to employ her paranormal skills for a mundane purpose: They ask her to divine whether there are underground water sources on their properties. On one such assignment, she feels "a black sensation" moments before she comes upon a girl in her midteens hanging from a tree: "Her feet pointed outward in a kind of loose releve, like some ballet dancer frozen in the classic first position." But when local police search the wooded site where Cassandra made the discovery, they find not the hanged girl but another one, also in her midteens, alive and disoriented. The police conclude that Cassandra's vision was a hallucination. As if to further shake her confidence, her father confesses that he's not really a diviner after all, just a charlatan. Cassandra thus begins examining her role in life, questioning whether she ought to abandon her paranormal pursuits and settle in as a teacher and a mother. "My problem," she says, "had always been that I could forevision what others ought to do but was too often blinded when it came to my own life, trainspotting my own future." In the meantime, a man begins stalking Cassandra, leaving threatening notes and, from the top of a lighthouse, hanging an effigy of Cassandra grasping one of her childhood dolls, which he stole from her home. As these two plot lines develop, the reader senses a letdown coming. Is this narrative, which begins so freshly with its almost startling descriptions, going to spin a conventional stalker tale laced with the well-worn theme of the central character's path to self-acceptance? Alas, Morrow scatters clues that make the final outcome all too predictable. (A line from Werner Herzog, quoted in the preface, just about gives away the course Cassandra ultimately takes in her life's journey.) I'm not sure whether readers will shrug off a chill after reading "The Diviner's Tale," or just shrug as its thin, sometimes meandering plot comes to a close. But there's a chance those who like their suspense subtle, distinctive and well-wrought will overlook the book's shortcomings and enjoy the shivers it evokes on a cold winter's night. Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top Recent Stories    PASSPORT TO PEKING: A Very British Mission to Mao's China    O: A Presidential Novel    POSSESSED: The Life of Joan Crawford    ESCAPE FROM THE LAND OF SNOWS: The Young Dalai Lama's Harrowing Flight to Freedom and the Making of a Spiritual Hero    UNLESS IT MOVES THE HUMAN HEART: The Craft and Art of Writing	Quick Clicks Free samples, coupons, daily newsletter with exclusives! 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"O: A Presidential Novel," more

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Washington Post Book Reviews For You Wednesday February 2, 2011 PASSPORT TO PEKING: A Very British Mission to Mao's China Patrick Wright Oxford Univ ISBN 978-0199541935 591 pages $34.95 Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley In September 1954, Patrick Wright reports, "several planeloads of Britons gathered in from various sometimes very loosely defined positions on the left of the political spectrum" flew from England to China, "where they would take part, as invited guests of the Chinese government, in the celebrations marking the fifth anniversary of Mao Tse-tung's Proclamationof the People's Republic of China on 1 October 1949." For all the Chinese leadership's rhetoric about friendship and peace, the invitations clearly were issued with propaganda in mind, and in the short run they paid off in that regard. In the long run, though, the results were decidedly mixed, due not so much to changes in the Britons' politics as to their (and the world's) revulsion "as Mao and his fellow Communists proceeded to convert China into a nuclear-armed, fully industrialized, and totalitarian superpower." What most of us in the West are likely to remember about China in the years between Mao's seizure of power in 1949 and his death in 1976 is the extraordinarily cruel and destructive turn that his revolution took, beginning in 1958 with the Five Year Plan known as the Great Leap Forward, which killed untold millions of Chinese in the name of agricultural collectivization, and culminating in the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, with the rise of the Red Guards and the chaos they wrought throughout the country. What we are likely to forget is that, for the first five years of the regime, hopes, within and without China,were high. Wright quotes Alan Winnington, "the British Communist journalist who stayed in Peking after (Prime Minister) Anthony Eden had refused to renew his passport," as calling this period "the golden years" and writing: "The Communists rode on a wave of success: currency stabilized; famine ended, railways restored; industry booming; coal, steel and power leap-frogging. We found workers everywhere at lathes while building workers were finishing the factories. Everyone was better off -- very little better off but in China that could make the difference between life and death." The delegations from Britain, in other words, traveled to a China almost unrecognizable to those of us who now know of it as an economic giant that somehow managed to emerge from the wasteland that was Mao's legacy. Beyond that, as Wright says,"the book is far more about post-war Britain and its inherited perspectives than it is about the reality of China, either now or then. It is partly for this reason that I have ... retained the old system of romanized spellings as opposed to the more recently introduced pinyin, and partly in order to acknowledge that, whatever lens it may be viewed through, the walled city that was 'Peking' in 1954 really is not the same city as the 'Beijing' of the early twenty-first century." Now the city is "Beijing" to just about everyone; one of the few contexts in which "Peking" still is used is in "Peking duck,"which, as it happens, the British visitors of 1954 consumed in copious amounts. At that time Peking was still very much "an ancient city wrapped in high crenellated walls some 40 kilometres long and accessed through sixteen multi-storeyed gate towers. ... (and) still recognizable as the city of Kublai Khan." It had "palaces, peony beds, lotus-filled lakes, pagodas, dragon walls, carved lions embodying the antithetical yet also complimentary principles of yin and yang." It was a jumble "of narrow walled alleys ('hutongs') with gates leading to residential compounds containing internal courtyards joined by 'moon gates' and south-facing single-storey houses with pitched roofs, paper-covered windows, and ancient wooded lattices." Thus the city to which these planeloads of Brits traveled "still resembled the imperial capital of the ancient Middle Kingdom," and though the new rulers had plans to eradicate many vestiges of what they regarded as its corrupt past, that process had scarcely begun in 1954, permitting the visitors to see a country and culture that have now almost, if not entirely, disappeared. It was also a country that had only recently ended its central role in support of North Korea in the Korean War, a country where anti-Western -- most particularly anti-American -- feelings ran deep, especially within the leadership. It "was a challenging time for Westerners invited to go behind the 'Bamboo Curtain,'" and some members of the British delegations were reluctant to be perceived as "fellow-travellers," among them the philosopher A.J. Ayer, who accepted the invitation only "after phoning (the architect) Hugh Casson, whom he knew to be a man of Conservative political opinions, and establishing that he too would be willing to go." Of course he would. It was too good (and rare) an opportunity to be missed. Not merely was China terra incognita to many in the West, not merely was it in the midst of revolutionary if risky upheaval, but "it was scarcely possible for a twentieth-century Westerner to go to China without already having more or less exotic versions of that Eastern land piled up at the back of his mind." Who could resist the opportunity to visit "legendary 'Cathay,'" not to mention visit it as the guest of Prime Minister Chou En-lai, who on a mission to Geneva earlier that year had snowed many in the West, who saw "not a rough-necked' agrarian reformer' dressed in padded cotton but an urbane, cultured, and articulate man in a tailored suit and silk tie." So off they flew to China. One delegation, members of the Labor Party's National Executive Committee, was led by the former prime minister, Clement Attlee. Another, a "motley group of scientists, artists, politicians, and writers who followed in the wake of Clement Attlee's departed delegation," included Ayer and Casson along with the artists Paul Hogarth and Stanley Spencer. They were mostly people of the left (and mostly, though not entirely, men), but they had their share of arguments. An "intense personal antagonism ... developed between A.J. Ayer and Spencer." Mostly, though, they spent their time traveling, seeing the sights of both the Old and the New China, listening to enthusiastic reports from their Chinese handlers, and trying with only limited success to distinguish "true facts from the optimistic propaganda in which they were so carefully wrapped." Not many of the delegates retained their enthusiasm for Mao's China through the deeply disenchanting years of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Many seem to have clung, on the other hand, to fantasies about similarities between Britain and China that had almost no basis in reality. This is among the characteristics that Wright finds particularly and peculiarly British, but it seems to me particularly and peculiarly human: to want to find the familiar in the alien. Wright, a professor of cultural history at Nottingham Trent University and the author of many well-received books, writes fluidly and engagingly, but he comes close to torpedoing his own aims in "Passport to Peking" by refusing to let go of a single shred of his research. The material is interesting but is presented at such interminable length that the reader is soon overwhelmed, and turned off. There could be no more telling indication of how much wretched excess is to be found here that not until page 269 (of 504 pages of text) does Wright actually get the first of his delegations to China. I am sorry to report that it is not worth the wait. Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top O: A Presidential Novel Anonymous Simon & Schuster ISBN 978-1451625967 353 pages $25.99 Reviewed by Ron Charles, the fiction editor of The Washington Post. He can be reached at charlesr(at symbol)washpost.com. Like the people who end up running for president, this anonymous novel about Barack Obama's re-election campaign isn't as good as you hoped or as bad as you feared. Maybe the American people get the roman a clef they deserve. Because regardless of how closely "O" anticipates next year's campaign, it's an uncanny response to this month's call for a more civil political discourse. In fact, its anonymity may be the sexiest thing about "O." The publisher is being coy, claiming it was written by someone who "has been in the room with Barack Obama," which means we can rule out Kim Jong Il, but just about everybody else is still fair game. In any case, trust me, it's far too earnest for Christopher Buckley. And "O" has none of the snazzy wit of Joe Klein's briefly anonymous novel about the Clinton campaign, or the grandeur of Robert Penn Warren's "All the King's Men," or the pathos of Ethan Canin's "America America." No, in the pages of this new novel, primary colors fade to soft pastels. The story opens just a few months in the future: The economy is picking up slowly, the war in Afghanistan is still grinding along, and the political operatives are getting their soldiers into position for that once-every-four-years ordeal mandated by our Constitution. A tawdry scandal has swept aside Obama's campaign manager and opened up the job for Cal Regan, a handsome, affable insider who plays the novel's central character in a cast that remains surprisingly small. There's a list at the front of the book, but you won't need it. Despite the world-altering import of these events, "O" operates like one of those underfunded BBC productions in which eight actors represent the angry citizens of Rome. Cal's job is to engineer the re-election of Barack Obama, and like a well-run campaign, everything in this novel remains relentlessly "on message." Even the physical world seems excluded from these characters' lives, a fair representation, I'm sure, of the claustrophobic concentration the campaign requires. In fact, that's what "O" does best -- without any undue cynicism or gooey romanticism: It clearly illustrates, season by season, just how effectively presidential campaigners plan, draft and articulate the political discourse that the press pretends it controls. "The Office of the President has the power to change the subject anytime," a staffer reminds Obama as they consider an opponent's accusations. "You could get another dog, and the press would forget about this and start begging for bulletins about how it's getting along with your other dog." "O's" dramatization of a presidential race may shock an eighth grade student council member somewhere in Kansas City, but most of us will wish that the author had pursued his themes with a little more satiric bite. Nonetheless, he describes the typical campaign with documentary accuracy, and he's particularly good at the dynamic between old and new journalism. Gabby online news sites, such as Bianca Stefani's Stefani Report (a thinly veiled version of the Huffington Post) float salacious stories, while the mainstream media tut-tut and report on the controversy surrounding the rumors. Largely ignoring the pressing issues of the day, the New York Times and The Washington Post obsess over the horse race, the tone and the process of the campaign. And while each candidate portrays himself as above the fray, Cal and his men trade scoops with their favorite reporters in exchange for favorable treatment. (And yes, they're mostly men. For all its up-to-the-minute pretensions, "O" consigns women to the roles of wives, mothers, spunky beat reporters and obnoxious divorcees.) Dramatically, "O" suffers from its concentration on a pair of candidates determined to be civil and restrained. That would be nice for our country, but it's damning for a novel. The author seems incapable of competing with the outlandish real-life characters who have blessed and cursed American political life. Sarah Palin, "flaunting that whole lusty librarian thing," has decided not to run. "But I'm not going away," she says in a brief, barely parodic appearance. "I'll be keepin' an eye on our candidates." Instead, Obama's opponent is Tom "Terrific" Morrison, the perfect amalgamation of John McCain (without the maverick instability) and Mitt Romney (without the Mormonism): "square-jawed, straight-backed, irresistibly perfect." He's got it all: military service, humility, savvy and business acumen. You think this is a setup for the big reveal -- the pregnant campaign aide, the blue dress that's never been dry-cleaned, the wide stance in a public restroom -- but Morrison really is a fine, upstanding man. And what's more, he's determined to run a clean, fair, courteous campaign. Wake me up when it's over. But at the center is Obama himself -- the cool, brilliant black man from Chicago, with "an anthropologist's detachment," who has to keep worrying about coming across as too articulate, too good a talker. "O" stays very close to the conventional wisdom and never presses into the intimate details of his life or his marriage -- none of those squirm-inducing intimacies we got from Curtis Sittenfeld's "American Wife" about the Bushes. It wouldn't be fair to say "O" is a stridently partisan novel, but it's clear that the author's sympathies are with the current resident of the White House. Obama comes across here as determined but weary. "I'm tired," he tells his staff as they begin planning for "nine miserable months" of campaigning. "He feared nothing more than losing control of his own destiny," the author writes. But how to win over these fickle American voters -- portrayed in these pages largely as a mob, "impervious to facts and reason or even the memory of their recent experience with Republican incompetence"? Obama laments that everything he did "to alleviate the anxiety of the American middle class seemed at times only to exasperate the people more. It was as if they had expected O to turn the country around in his first month in office, and when he didn't, they hardened their hearts against him." According to this story, the White House will run with the slogan "Promises Made. Promises Kept." That's a little flat, but it feels about right for what we're about to endure over the next 22 months. If you want to get a jump on all that -- the ads, the debates, the op-eds, the speeches -- here's a blueprint that's probably pretty close to the mark. 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"Possessed" and "Escape From the Land of Snows"

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Washington Post Book Reviews For You Tuesday February 1, 2011 POSSESSED: The Life of Joan Crawford Donald Spoto William Morrow ISBN 978-0061856006 336 pages $25.99 Reviewed by Charles Matthews First you're another Sloe-eyed vamp, Then someone's mother, Then you're camp. The career arc of the Hollywood actress was neatly traced by Stephen Sondheim in the song "I'm Still Here" from the musical"Follies." Joan Crawford perfectly fits that paradigm: The flapper of "Our Dancing Daughters" became the suffering mother of "Mildred Pierce" and, finally, the faded star of the over-the-top "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" Donald Spoto fleshes out the pattern a little more in his new biography. "For half a century, she assessed what the public wanted in each era: the jazz baby during the 1920s; the independent thinker of the 1930s; the troubled postwar woman of the1940s; the romantically starved woman of the 1950s; the horror queen of the 1960s and 1970s." It was her own sheer ambition and determination that transformed Lucille Le Sueur, the former laundress and chorus girl, into Joan Crawford, the embodiment of Hollywood glamour. Born and raised in poverty, she was barely educated, admitting late in life that she "never went beyond the fifth grade." But when she married the sophisticated Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Spoto tells us, she set about "with her usual single-minded energy" to turn herself into a "society doyenne": "She studied French, engaged a vocal coach and learned opera arias, she learned to dress with better taste, and ... read voraciously, picking up a book whenever she had a quarter hour to herself at home: the Romantic poets, the classics, history, the nineteenth century novelists, Shakespeare, H.G. Wells and more." The intensity of her efforts at self-improvement can by gauged by a claim she made: "I became a pretty good polo player in order to get over my fear of horses." Which is a little like swimming the English Channel to get over a fear of water. Spoto's biography gives you the sense that it must have been terribly exhausting to be Crawford, always laboring to achieve and hold on to stardom. No wonder she hit the vodka bottle a little too much, and married too often and seldom well. It didn't help, either, that iconoclasts were always ready to hack away at her image. Even when she was still Lucille Le Sueur, there were rumors she had danced nude in nightclubs and made pornographic movies: One man approached MGM with a clip from a film that he claimed was of her, offering to sell it to the studio or he would take it to the papers. Though studio head Louis B. Mayer asserted that "the girl in this picture could be anybody -- anyone at all -- except our Lucille," Spoto also notes that the blackmailer's "house mysteriously burned to the ground the following month." But the greatest damage to Crawford's reputation was done posthumously, by her adopted daughter, Christina, and by makers of the 1981 film version of Christina's memoir, "Mommie Dearest," which presented Joan as a cold, harshly demanding, excessively controlling mother. Spoto calls the book "a vituperative act of revenge after Joan excised her two oldest children from her will after many years of discord." He is determined to repair the damage, even investigating the most famous moment in the book and movie, in which Joan attacks Christina for putting her clothes on the wrong kind of hangers: "No wire hangers, ever!"According to Spoto, launderers and dry cleaners "were under strict instructions to return all clothing on the richly covered hangers Joan provided." He thinks Christina remembered these instructions and reworked them into "a mad scene worthy of Italian opera." Spoto is an unapologetic fan, beginning his book with Crawford's response to a letter he wrote her as an 11-year-old in 1952. He has seen, and writes about, every extant Crawford film, and "Possessed" is larded with praise for her acting. But he is willing to admit that Crawford betrayed herself into that final stage of her career: camp. She "regarded the thickly arched eyebrows and over-the-lip gloss as an infallible sign of female desirability," long after the fashion had faded. As a result,"her appearance is something to get beyond, before the quality of the acting can be assessed. Alas, performers of drag quickly got to work and offered depressingly accurate parodies." A prolific biographer of almost everyone from Jesus to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Spoto has interviewed and written about so many of Crawford's contemporaries that he seems to feel compelled to tell us everything even remotely related to his subject, and the book sometimes feels padded. His prose plods at best but sometimes stumbles, as when he writes about Crawford traveling with "a trunk full of furs and her millionaire husband." But we need a reassessment of Crawford, a star now eclipsed by such contemporaries as Greta Garbo, Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn, even though she was probably as good an actress as any of them. Her lively, natural performance is the best thing in "Grand Hotel," that display case full of ham, and she stole "The Women" out from under the neatly powdered noses of Norma Shearer, Rosalind Russell, Paulette Goddard and Joan Fontaine. Spoto has given us a useful start at rescuing Crawford not only from Christina, but also from herself. Charles Matthews is a writer and editor in Northern California. Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top ESCAPE FROM THE LAND OF SNOWS: The Young Dalai Lama's Harrowing Flight to Freedom and the Making of a Spiritual Hero ESCAPE FROM THE LAND OF SNOWS: The Young Dalai Lama's Harrowing Flight to Freedom and the Making of a Spiritual HeroStephen Talty Crown ISBN 978-0307460950 302 pages $26 MY SPIRITUAL JOURNEY: Personal Reflections, Teachings, and Talks the Dalai Lama with Sofia Stril-Rever. Translated from the French by Charlotte MandellMy Spiritual Journey HarperOne ISBN 978-0061960222 284 pages $25.99 Reviewed by Jeffrey Paine Was there ever a more unlikely life story? A child is born somewhere too remote to appear on any known map, and his childhood, though taking place in the mid-20th century, is redolent of the Middle Ages. Yet that boy grows up to become probably the most admired citizen of the world today. The strangest fact about the Dalai Lama's strange life, though, is that it remains largely untold. Most books promoted as biographies of him hardly qualify as such and are indeed no more revealing than Testu Saiwai's manga, or cartoon, biography is here. Of recent attempts to provide insight into the Dalai Lama, the most ambitious is popular writer Stephan Talty's "Escape from the Land of Snows." Talty has actually written three books in one: a biography of the young Dalai Lama up to his 24th year (1959), a history of recent Tibet and a hair-raising tale of daring and escape. The last of these makes Talty's story come alive -- and made the Dalai Lama the man he is today. A decade after China's brutal conquest of Tibet, in 1959 a rumor leaked out that the Chinese communists were planning to assassinate the Dalai Lama. At a moment's notice, with scarcely any provisions, he undertook a near-suicidal flight across the trackless Himalayas. During that flight he began to shed the Tibetan ritual and ceremony that had always cocooned him. Confronting constant hardship, danger and imminent death, he transformed himself from an institution into an individual and thus began the process in which he became a Dalai Lama not just for Tibetans but for religious seekers everywhere. This adventure Talty tells remarkably well. Earlier, however, he seems almost timid with his materials: cautious when describing the Dalai Lama's uncanny childhood, lest he appear too gullible; hedging when recounting Chinese atrocities in Tibet, lest he appear too partisan. (Here Tetsu Saiwai's manga biography is clearer, exploring what was extraordinary and indicting what was brutal. Comic strips can be freer.) Worse, the Dalai Lama is off-stage for nearly half the book while Talty explains Tibetan politics and history, and his inner character remains as elusive as ever. The Dalai Lama himself prefers not to discuss his inner life but rather social issues or Buddhist thought. As for the latter, others -- notably Anam Thubten, Traleg Kyabgon and Tsoknyi Rinpoche -- have written books that explain Tibetan Buddhism better to Westerners. If Tibetan Buddhism is popular among non-Tibetans today, it is not for what the Dalai Lama says but for how he has acted and lived out its principles in public. Two new books with the Dalai Lama himself named as their author would seem to offer us both a look from the inside and a sense of why he is such an attractive figure. Except that the Dalai Lama did not write, or apparently read, any of "The Essence of Happiness," nor of the bestselling "The Art of Happiness" from which it is excerpted. Howard Cutler has interviewed the Dalai Lama and from those interviews has assembled a self-help book, reduced here to nugget-size bites, which omits whatever is unique to or difficult about Tibetan Buddhism. A whole page, for example, is occupied by three words: "Change takes time." One hardly needs the Dalai Lama to produce that pearl of wisdom; your addled great-uncle Clarence will do. If "The Essence of Happiness" has a misleading byline, "My Spiritual Journey" has a misleading title, for it is no autobiography. These selected talks and teachings are assembled, though, to reveal "the temporal continuity of the Dalai Lama's thinking." And gradually the book does paint a kind of Portrait of the Lama as a Young (and Aging) Man, as it traces his largely unchanged consciousness from youth to the present day. For readers interested in knowing what has remained constant in the Dalai Lama throughout his life, "My Spiritual Journey" identifies three characteristics. First, look for compassionate motivation: Far from hating the Chinese, for example, he prays for their welfare and thinks of them as his brothers and sisters. Secondly, look for the lack of a sense of self-importance: He considers his exceptional life as being merely ordinary, and he describes himself in a down-to-earth, often comical light. Finally, and perhaps most important, is his mental flexibility. The Dalai Lama appears able to accommodate every possible situation: He can imagine how Tibetans could become an acceptable part of China, for instance, and he can accept that there may not be another Dalai Lama after him or, if there is, it could be a woman. "If I reincarnate as a woman," he jokes, "naturally I will be a very beautiful woman physically." Among the things the Dalai Lama can accept is that there is no absolute need for his own religious calling. "As a Buddhist, I don't see any difference between religious practice and daily life," he writes. "One can do without religion, but not without spirituality." "Spirituality" may be the most nebulous word in the English language, but "My Spiritual Journey" provides a definition that both devotee and atheist might approve: "the full blossoming of human values that is essential for the good of all." And what would a fully blossomed human being look like? The four books reviewed here -- in comic-book form or by collection of sayings, through adventure tale or indirect confession -- provide one possible illustration, a workable prototype. Jeffery Paine is the author of, among other books, "Re-enchantment: Tibetan Buddhism Comes to the West" and the editor of "Adventures with the Buddha." 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