"A Tigger in the Kitchen," "Emily, Alone," more

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Washington Post Book Reviews For You Thursday April 7, 2011 A TIGER IN THE KITCHEN: A Memoir of Food and Family Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan Voice ISBN 978-1401341282 296 pages $14.99 Reviewed by Dennis Drabelle Early in this savory memoir, New York writer Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan gives a sense of the caution that pervades Singapore, the city of her birth. When she called to tell her parents about her new boyfriend and mentioned his surname, Nakamura, her father pointed out that her two aunts had been killed by the Japanese. "I would have to tell him several times," she writes, "that the boyfriend was a third-generation American and could not possibly have been responsible for the Japanese occupation of Singapore during World War II." It also took some persuading before Tan's parents came to terms with her decisions to attend college in the United States and then to settle here. On a visit home, she realized that her grandmother, at least, had reconciled herself to the uprooting when Ah-ma agreed to teach her how to make popiah, a roll "filled with a melange of ingredients like minced shrimp and jicama." "She had never wanted me to be away from her," Tan writes. "But now that I was, and now that I might have a family of my own there someday soon, she wanted me to listen up and learn." At the end of the book, having deepened her relationships with several other relatives, Tan gets her mother to tell her how to make one of Asia's most labor-intensive delicacies: bird's-nest soup. Dennis Drabelle can be reached at drabelled(at symbol)washpost.com. Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top STARTED EARLY, TOOK MY DOG Kate Atkinson Reagan Arthur/Little Brown ISBN 978-0316066730 371 pages $24.99 Reviewed by Kevin Allman, a writer and editor who lives in New Orleans "To the Pythagoreans, three was the first real number, because they saw it as having a beginning, a middle and an end," says a character early in Kate Atkinson's latest novel, the excellent "Started Early, Took My Dog." Atkinson goes on to introduce three characters and interweave meditations on other sets of three -- particularly beginnings, middles and ends. Recently retired policewoman Tracy Waterhouse, a 50ish woman with no particular attachments and no plans for the rest of her life, has taken a job as security director of a Leeds, England, shopping mall, more out of boredom than anything else. Leaving work one day, she runs into an old nemesis, Kelly Cross, a "prostitute, druggie, thief, all-round pikey." Kelly is dragging an abused toddler onto a city bus, and in a split-second Tracy finds herself asking, "How much for the kid?" An envelope changes hands, the bus pulls away, and Tracy is suddenly the guardian of Courtney, a solemn toddler she'd just purchased on impulse. Meanwhile, former police inspector and private eye Jackson Brodie (returning from three of Atkinson's previous novels) is wandering the English back roads, looking at the endless ruins of British civilization, trying to decide if all roads lead to or away from home. His split-second decision arrives when he sees a man brutalizing a small dog in a park. Brodie finds himself with a dog he's not quite sure what to do with. As Waterhouse and Brodie both get things they're not sure they want, an elderly character actress is losing the one thing that matters to her: her memory. Tilly Squires, currently playing the mother of a detective on a cheapjack TV crime drama, is becoming known among her co-workers as "Ten-take Tilly" because of her failing faculties. When the producers finally decide to kill her off, sending her into retirement like Waterhouse and Brodie, it's all Tilly can do to remember that she's standing on a set and the woman aiming a gun at her is another actress. How Atkinson interweaves these lives -- in the past, the present and the uncertain future -- is her particular gift as a writer, and her plot remains clear and straight even as she unfolds her stories at leisure. Along the way, she introduces threads from the past, including another lost toddler from a 1975 murder scene investigated by Waterhouse. All the tales tie together into a knot that's complicated, elegant and completely satisfying. "Started Early, Took My Dog" -- the first line of one of Emily Dickinson's simplest and most ambiguous poems -- is as much an examination of the way we live as it is a suspenser. Waterhouse and Brodie both inhabit a world of iPhones and a disappearing middle class, finding themselves stunned and adrift on the sidelines of life, obsolete at 50 with nothing ahead but decades of make-work menial jobs. Both have seen too much to have faith in a world where the child abusers and dog torturers seem to be winning, and it has turned them slightly numb, with only occasional prickles of interest in being alive. When Waterhouse begins fantasizing about running away with her purchased child, reinventing themselves as a proper mother and daughter named "Imogen" and "Lucy," it's a fantasy so tempting that she takes baby steps to make it happen, just to amuse herself. When she commits to the charade, she becomes Tilly's mirror opposite: a woman who wants nothing more than to retreat into a fantasy world. Waterhouse is a marvelously original character. When another aging cop sighs and tells her it's a different world these days, "Tracy thought she must be missing something, it felt like the same world as ever to her. The rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer, kids everywhere falling through the cracks. The Victorians would have recognized it. People just watched a lot more TV and found celebrities interesting, that was all that was different." Atkinson's dark wit and mastery at sketching connections -- between people, places, times, things, emotions -- are reminiscent of Ruth Rendell, and Atkinson shares that grand master's facility in balancing cynicism, compassion and pragmatism. The result is crime fiction that's also splendid modern literature. Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top THE NIGHT SEASON Chelsea Cain Minotaur ISBN 978-0312619763 322 pages $24.99 Reviewed by Maureen Corrigan, who is the book critic for the NPR program "Fresh Air," teaches literature at Georgetown University The problem with reviewing mysteries is that one can't talk about who-(or what)-dun-it, yet sometimes the story's ultimate value rests on that revelation. Take Dorothy Sayers' 1934 classic, "The Nine Tailors." If you've read it, you know what I'm talking about; if you haven't read it, do so. Now. The atmosphere of the English fen country in the novel is haunting, and the character of Lord Peter Wimsey is, as always, blandly erudite. The ending, however, in which the murderer is unmasked, is so brilliant that it boosts Sayers' creeper into the Golden Age of Mystery Hall of Fame. Then there's the opposite situation. I am talking about middling crime stories that creak along agreeably enough until a killer so preposterous is revealed that readers feel ashamed for ever having lost themselves for one nanosecond in that fictional world. Unfortunately, I meandered into Chelsea Cain's "The Night Season" and didn't have the good sense to quit reading before the most inane murderer I've ever encountered in mystery fiction was exposed. If I told you who-(or what)-dun-it, you would know how ludicrous this story is. But I can't tell you. I can only say that my 12-year-old daughter asked me why I was snorting, rolling my eyes and shaking my head as I read the end of Cain's book. I then told her the identity of the killer. She wisely commented, "It sounds like a 12-year-old boy who's read too much manga wrote that book." Yup. So what else is there to say about "The Night Season," which is the fourth in Cain's series starring Portland, Ore., police detective Archie Sheridan? Well, Cain gives a nice sense of foreboding with her many weather descriptions. When the novel begins, a monsoon is hitting Portland, the city dikes are about to crumble, and ferocious flooding is about to ensue. To add to this misery, a serial crazy is at work amid all the rain and wind. A female corpse is discovered in a deserted city amusement park. Since Archie has already had a prolonged, close encounter with a different serial killer earlier in this series, he eventually figures out the absurd modus operandi of this latest maniac. In between, a lot of splashing around on the soggy streets of Portland takes place. As so often happens in mystery-land, a contemporary natural disaster stirs up remnants of the past. In this case, the flood disturbs a skeleton left over from the real-life Vanport City Flood that occurred on May 30, 1948. That flood, according to historical accounts, killed 15 people and destroyed the city when a dike holding back the Columbia River crumbled. Archie's love interest, reporter Susan Ward, who writes the "quirky crime roundup column" for the local, barely breathing newspaper, pounds out a story about the disinterred skeleton, thus ensuring that she, too, will soon be a target of the crazed evildoer who has ties to the sins of the past. Those ties seemed pretty murky to me and, thus, not credible as a motive to make this person dive off the deep end, so to speak. But, then, my mind was already weakened by the aforesaid loony revelation about the identity of the killer, so maybe I was no longer capable of judgment. "The Night Season" is a silly mystery that will be enjoyed only by readers who don't think the genre is capable of better. In 1930, the Detection Club, of which Dorothy Sayers (along with other immortals like Agatha Christie and G.K. Chesterton) was a member, approved a set of famous rules for mystery writers, known as "The Decalogue." Though somewhat in jest, the Decalogue, among other things, banned the reliance on "hitherto undiscovered poisons; supernatural agencies; and more than one secret room or passage" in mystery novels. I think it's safe to say that had Cain's "The Night Season" been written early in the last century, her dopey culprit would have been immediately added to "The Decalogue's" list of don'ts. Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top EMILY, ALONE Stewart O'Nan Viking ISBN 978-0670022359 255 pages $25.95 Reviewed by Ron Charles, the fiction editor of The Washington Post. He can be reached at charlesr(at symbol)washpost.com. Lately, Stewart O'Nan hasn't made it easy to recommend his novels. The only thing they've got going for them is their superb quality. But ask, "What's it about?" and his fans sound defensive or pretend they're getting an important call on their cellphones. Just try persuading your book club to read a novel about the day a Red Lobster restaurant closes. (Without incident.) Or how about a novel that describes an old lady waiting for spring? (It comes.) Face it: O'Nan has become the Kobayashi Maru scenario of book marketing. Even when his novels promise heart-stopping spectacle -- Daughter kidnapped! Husband killed! Teens crash! -- he resists every expected dramatic element. This is an author who would drive all around town to avoid running over a single cheap thrill. He subverts our desire for commotion, and searches instead for drama in the quotidian motions of survivors. His new novel is an even harder sell than usual. It's about an 80-year-old widow in Pittsburgh named Emily. She's relatively healthy and financially secure. Highlights of the plot include lunch at the art museum, discovering a scratch on the car, waiting for thank-you notes to arrive. This may be why nobody ever asks for the "Geriatric Fiction" section. But maybe they should. Consider, for instance, how many supposedly "daring," "illuminating," "startling" novels we get every year about disaffected young men, while the lives of the elderly -- the fastest growing segment of our population -- remain the stuff of grim or ribald caricatures. This strikes me as a failure of nerve more than imagination. After all, most of us would like to hang around long enough to bankrupt Social Security, but for all the novels we've got about death, the real undiscovered country would seem to be old age. Which is what makes me enthusiastic about "Emily, Alone." It quietly shuffles in where few authors have dared to go. And it's so humane and so finely executed that I hope it finds those sensitive readers who will appreciate it. Six years have passed since Emily Maxwell's husband died, and since then she's lived alone, managing just fine, thank you very much, though it's annoying not to drive anymore. "After a run-in with a fire hydrant, followed quickly by another with a Duquesne Light truck, she admitted -- bitterly, since it went against her innate thriftiness -- that maybe taking taxis was the better part of valor." That wry tone runs throughout this quiet novel, never subjecting Emily to satire, but allowing her to enjoy a bit of comedy at her own expense. "She was dying, yes, fine, they all were, by degrees," O'Nan writes, catching the spirit of her fortitude just right. "If Dr. Sayid expected her to be devastated by the idea, that only showed how young he was. There was no point in going into hysterics. It wasn't the end of the world, just the end of her, and lately she'd come to think that was natural, and possibly something to be desired, if it could be achieved with a modicum of dignity." Through short, crisp chapters we follow Emily's well-ordered, dignified life, frequently challenged by calamities and disappointments large and small, all gently captured in O'Nan's precise, unadorned prose. Some of these scenes are exquisite in their perfect balance of poignancy and restraint, while others sport a dark wit that's never maudlin: "She didn't need to be reminded," he writes, "that she was a single misstep from disaster," but that's no reason to be late with one's Christmas cards. The terror of being driven around town by her nearsighted, easily distracted sister-in-law makes her consider buying a new car. Her ancient, obese dog keeps threatening to die, a loss that scares her almost more than the death of her remaining friends. And Pittsburgh, so long her home, now seems to be slipping away from her memories, one rehab after another. But the emotional heart of the novel is Emily's concern for her two adult children. The smoke has long since cleared from the old battles of their teenage years, and now Emily must negotiate with them carefully, from a position of confirmed weakness, knowing that they hold (and will use) the ultimate weapon: access to her grandchildren, those increasingly modern and remote beings. O'Nan has an uncanny sensitivity to the silent tensions that run beneath the most ordinary conversations, the unexpressed disappointment that follows when family members fail to match our enthusiasm for a holiday visit, a lecture on frugality or "The Nutcracker." Emily's barely repressed anticipation of Christmas will tweak the conscience of any irritated adult child. And O'Nan's ability to record the loaded comments around the dining room table makes me feel it's already late December. O'Nan details all this tenderly, with no more sentimentality than Emily allows herself. "The temptation was to mourn those days," he writes, "when they were young and busy and alive. As much as Emily missed them, she understood the reason that era seemed so rich -- partly, at least -- was because it was past, memorialized, the task they'd set themselves of raising families accomplished." "Emily, Alone" is a sequel to "Wish You Were Here" (2002), O'Nan's long, multifaceted story about a family's last summer vacation in Chautauqua, N.Y. It's tempting to assume that this new novel, at half the first one's length and with its narrow, sclerotic plot, is just a death rattle from the original story, but in fact it's better. Shorter, wittier, much more tightly focused, "Emily, Alone" makes the perfect demonstration of O'Nan's humanizing vision. Yes, there's always the danger that he's writing what Frank Norris once disparaged as "the drama of the broken tea cup." But what saves him is his profound respect for Emily, the hopes and fears that lie beyond her old-lady foibles and fussiness, which, even if you aren't an old lady and never will be, turn out to be the same hopes and fears we all harbor alone. Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top Recent Stories    THE SECOND SON    THREE BOOKS ABOUT COFFEE    MUSIC FOR SILENCED VOICES: Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets    THREE COZY MYSTERIES    TRUE YOU: A Journey to Finding and Loving Yourself	Quick Clicks "Give me ONE Day and I'll make your lawn the most dazzling spectacle on the block..." Jupiter Jack - Safely Talk and Drive At the Same Time - Any Car Any Phone Full Court Records Available: Find Out Anything About Anyone! Click now...
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"Coffee Talk," "Everything But The Coffee," more

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Washington Post Book Reviews For You Wednesday April 6, 2011 THE SECOND SON Jonathan Rabb Farrar Straus Giroux ISBN 978-0374299132 294 pages $26 Reviewed by Wendy Smith The mean streets and meaner political climate of Berlin provided an ominous backdrop to policeman Nikolai Hoffner's investigations in the masterful noir mysteries "Rosa" and "Shadow and Light." But in the summer of 1936, as the Olympic Games begin, 62-year-old Hoffner is glad to leave his beloved city. He's been forced to retire after the discovery that his mother was Jewish, and he's worried about his son Georg, on assignment for a British newsreel company in Spain. The young man hasn't been heard from since the civil war erupted in July. When Hoffner learns that Georg is, in fact, an agent for British Intelligence on the trail of Nazi gun shipments to Franco's fascists, he heads for Spain to find him. Tracking Georg from the anarchist stronghold of Barcelona across loyalist and nationalist lines to the Portuguese border, Hoffner encounters a country racked by the same fratricidal conflicts he experienced in Berlin, where he vainly tried to detach his other son from the Nazi Party. He understands the look of "deep and abiding loss" in the eyes of Mila, a doctor who gives him shelter in Barcelona. Her fascist brother has been disowned by their communist father. Mila accompanies Hoffner on his journey in hopes of reaching her brother and persuading him to come with them. As they travel, love slowly grows between them, two people damaged in the most personal way by the murderous politics of their age. In "The Second Son," capturing 1930s Spain with the same vivid specificity he brought to Weimar Germany in this trilogy's first two volumes, Rabb depicts a society at war with itself, in which even the good guys commit brutal acts and no one will walk away unscathed. The revelation that the fix has been in from the moment Hoffner left Berlin exposes a level of political calculation all the more horrifying because, in the extreme situation Rabb depicts, it's probably necessary. The detached cynicism of those pulling the strings (untouchable, as they always are in noir fiction) contrasts starkly with the elemental agony of Hoffner's family. Leading us along a twisted narrative path strewn with clues hidden in plain sight, Rabb arrives at a denouement that shows the malignant particulars of Nazi doctrine. It's a dark conclusion to the series, but it's true to the history through which Rabb's guilt-ridden protagonist has suffered. We can be glad that Hoffner finds in his love for Mila "the only faith he had ever known," even though we can be certain that, in the terrible period Rabb has re-created, no faith is secure or eternal. Wendy Smith is a contributing editor at the American Scholar. Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top THREE BOOKS ABOUT COFFEE Christopher Schoppa NA ISBN NA NA pages $NA Reviewed by Christopher Schoppa Not long ago, America's penchant for coffee seemed to be waning, but that death knell was premature. The United States remains the largest consumer of coffee - roughly 25 percent of the world market. So grab a cup of joe and pore over this trio of books paying homage to the favored bean. 1 -- "COFFEE TALK: The Stimulating Story of the World's Most Popular Brew," by Morton Satin (Prometheus, $21.95). According to this charming volume, coffee is technically a seed, not a bean. Morton Satin, who became something of an expert on food working for multinational corporations and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, offers a delightful, lively take on the beverage's origin (Ethiopia); its perfecting (Turkey and the rest of the Muslim world); the rise of the coffeehouse as social nexus (Europe and North America); and the development of gourmet coffee in such outlets as Peet's in Berkeley, Calif., and of course Starbucks. 2 -- "EVERYTHING BUT THE COFFEE: Leaning About America from Starbucks," by Bryant Simon (Univ. of California; paperback, $17.95). The author is interested in Americans' rampant consumerism (what he calls a "postneed society"), and what better vehicle is at hand than the Starbucks phenomenon? Simon argues that, like many other corporations crafting brand images around the world, Starbucks set out to fill a vacuum left by the fading role of public institutions and civic society. 3 -- "ONWARD: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul," by Howard Schultz with Joanne Gordon (Rodale, $25.99). Schultz made Starbucks what it is, and this book might be considered his response to its many detractors. He can also point to results: Since he returned to the company in 2008, Starbuck's has enjoyed a rebound in sales, record profits and higher customer traffic. Christopher Schoppa can be reached at schoppac(at symbol)washpost.com. Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top Recent Stories    MUSIC FOR SILENCED VOICES: Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets    THREE COZY MYSTERIES    TRUE YOU: A Journey to Finding and Loving Yourself    READING OBAMA: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition    MY FATHER'S FORTUNE	Quick Clicks Why pay over $90 a month for Cable or Sat.TV services? Download A TV! Clean Windshields without Straining or Stretching Are you pregnant? Just had a baby? Click for free baby samples, magazines, coupons and more.
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"Music for Silenced Voices," more

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Washington Post Book Reviews For You Tuesday April 5, 2011 MUSIC FOR SILENCED VOICES: Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets Wendy Lesser Yale Univ ISBN 978-0300169331 350 pages $28 Reviewed by Paul Mitchinson If professional credentials were everything, Wendy Lesser's new book might never have been written. A prolific and stylish essayist, and editor of the literary magazine Threepenny Review, she is not a "particularly musical person," as she confessed in her previous book "Room for Doubt" (2007). In fact, she remains "utterly ignorant about most aspects of music theory." Although she learned to play the violin as a child, Lesser promptly forgot how to read a score when she quit in her early teens. It took another 40 years or so -- during a 2003 performance of Brahms' German Requiem by the Berlin Philharmonic -- before she realized that "music had suddenly gained a new importance in my life, and that I myself had become a slightly different person as a result." The transformation is astonishingly convincing. Her new book, "Music for Silenced Voices," is a sensitive and enlightening meditation on the life and string quartets of the great Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975). Why the quartets? Most listeners will know Shostakovich through his monumental 15 symphonies, in which the composer spoke in the most stentorian tones, urging support for a beleaguered Leningrad, mourning the victims of war, praising revolution. But his symphonies were also public speeches, their displays of joy and grief carefully monitored by the Soviet censor. Many of them suffer accordingly. While Shostakovich's symphonies scream and howl, his quartets whisper sotto voce. The symphonies sometimes make you look away; the quartets entice you to lean closer. Lesser also believes they are something like a diary, offering "unparalleled access to the composer's inner life." Ah, the "inner life." The desire to rummage around Shostakovich's notoriously bunkered psyche has been an unhealthy amateur preoccupation for some decades now. Beginning with the 1979 publication of Shostakovich's alleged "memoir" -- now decisively debunked by the American scholar Laurel Fay -- and continuing through the "Shostakovich Wars" of the 1990s, many believed they had found the key message expressed in his music: a lifelong anti-Stalinism. The results were tedious and unconvincing and would have enraged the composer. Lesser sketches a far more grim and convincing portrait of the composer's character: fearful, guilt-ridden, death-obsessed. It is a view that has slowly come into focus since the fall of communism, and it helps explain the almost unremitting darkness of the late quartets. But Lesser's investigations also reveal lighter moments. No one who has heard the child-like wonder of the First Quartet would be surprised by her suggestion that the mood of the piece was influenced by Shostakovich's recollections of childhood. His second child, Maxim, had just been born in May 1938, and, as Lesser points out, he began work on the quartet shortly after -- "on the morning of his daughter's second birthday to be exact." One of her most inspired discussions involves the Fourth Quartet, dedicated in 1949 to Shostakovich's close friend Pyotr Vilyams, an artist and scenic designer who had died two years earlier. Most commentators dwell on the Jewish folk character of the quartet's final movement, something that made the work unperformable in the viciously anti-Semitic Russia of Stalin's final years. But Lesser also hears in the music a warm tribute to a colleague and friend, one of whose paintings hung prominently in the composer's study for his entire adult life. One interpretation need not push out the other, of course, but it is refreshing to learn something new and unexpected about such a beloved work. Lesser's book is neither academic nor exhaustive. (She fails to mention, for instance, Shostakovich's early experimentation with the string quartet in film music from the 1930s, or another earlier unsuccessful attempt at a full-blown quartet.) But scholarly nitpicking is irrelevant. Lesser relies less on musical scores and academic treatises than on interviews with musicians and performers -- and her own robust musical imagination. Sometimes, the enthusiast overpowers the stylist -- her discussion of the Third Quartet refers to its "very moving Adagio," the "very otherworldly atmosphere" of the final movement, and its "very sweet ... very moving and appealing" ending. But she usually manages to get to the heart of the matter more convincingly than many academic experts do. Most scholarly treatments of the Twelfth Quartet, for instance, wrestle over Shostakovich's unusual and idiosyncratic use of Schoenbergian 12-tone rows. (No retrogrades? No inversions? What was he thinking?) Lesser quietly points out that "to focus on the twelve-tone elements is to ignore what is most powerful and moving about the Twelfth Quartet: the way it dramatizes, acknowledges, and also resists its own sadness." Lesser, in other words, is giving Shostakovich back to his listeners. Long held hostage by his political masters in Soviet Russia and culture warriors in the West, Shostakovich is only now beginning to be heard for what he is -- one of the finest composers of the 20th century. Paul Mitchinson is a Toronto-based journalist who has written on music most recently for the London Review of Books and the Nation. Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top THREE COZY MYSTERIES Anna Mundow NA ISBN NA NA pages $NA Reviewed by Anna Mundow Cozy is a cloying word. Insert it in a sentence, and you can hear the adjacent nouns being snuggled to death. Yet in crime fiction, the cozy mystery and its offshoot, the village cozy, have a venerable lineage. Even Cecil Day Lewis, under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake, wrote a mystery series that now bears that adhesively sweet label. Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers are often called queens of the British cozy; Phoebe Atwood Taylor is their equivalent in the United States. More recently, the cozy tradition has splintered, with one set of practitioners heading into darkness and the other into relentless sunshine. As always, the dark side is more interesting. There you find Ruth Rendell's "The Killing Doll," Morag Joss' "Half Broken Things" and other depictions of unremarkable characters in nondescript villages becoming first alienated and then a tad homicidal. Meanwhile, on the sunny side of the village green, there are farmers-market mysteries, dog-walker mysteries, scrap 'n' craft mysteries and so on. Like fruit-flavored coffee, these seem to be mysteries concocted for readers who can't take their poison straight. Even established mystery writers, with substantial plots and characters to their credit, are producing lighter fare. 1. Consider "Blotto, Twinks and the Ex-King's Daughter" (Felony & Mayhem; paperback, $14.95), by Simon Brett, an author best known for two genuinely witty series, one featuring Charles Paris, an underemployed actor; and the other Mrs. Pargeter, the formidable widow of a gentleman burglar. In his new novel, however, the humor is no longer distinctively Brett's but rather a hectic mixture of Noel Coward, P.G. Wodehouse and, at times, the Marx Brothers. The opening sets the tone: "'It's frightfully awkward, Mater, but I'm afraid there's a dead body in the library.' 'Not now, Blotto. We have guests.' And, on waves of breeding, perfume and fine silk, the Dowager Duchess of Tawcester wafted away from her younger son to continue being the perfect hostess." Blotto is the family dimwit, whose "thoughts rarely ran deep enough to dampen the soles of his handmade brogues," but his sister Twinks has both beauty and brains. He refers to her as "me old biscuit barrel ... old pineapple ... old bloater," while she observes that Blotto may be "the crystallized ginger." This is indeed the 1920s when school chums have names like Twonker Mincebait, good eggs like Blotto zip around in bally fine roadsters and plots are operetta-thin. Small wonder, then, that a princess is kidnapped while visiting Tawcester Towers and that Blotto must rescue her from the lair of the usurping monarch of Mitteleuropa. It is on that alien turf that Brett's romp loses its early fizz and limps back to England the worse for wear. "Rodents!" as Blotto might say. 2. Nancy Atherton, by contrast, keeps her characters at home in "Aunt Dimity & the Family Tree" (Viking, $24.95), the 16th novel in her Aunt Dimity series. Home being the village of Finch, a hamlet so quaint it makes Brigadoon look gritty. Here the irrepressible Lori Shepherd lives with her adorable husband and sons in a "honey-colored cottage nestled snugly amid the rolling hills and patchwork fields of the Cotswolds." Life becomes even cozier when Shepherd's father-in-law buys a nearby manor house, but Lori soon becomes suspicious of his young servants. Are they hiding something? Or someone? Nothing gruesome happens; that is not Atherton's way. Instead, odd occurrences, including a burglary, prompt Lori to open yet again the cherished book on whose pages the ghost of Aunt Dimity communicates with the energetic sleuth. As events unfold, predictably, Lori observes that "life in an English village is never dull." Atherton's Dimity series, on the other hand, may be getting there. 3. C.S. Challinor delivers a racier cozy in "Murder on the Moor" (Midnight Ink; paperback, $14.95), the fourth novel in the Rex Graves mystery series and one that transplants the well-worn country house weekend plot to the Scottish Highlands. The setting is largely beside the point, however, as Challinor assembles her somewhat stock characters. Rex Graves, barrister and hero, is hoping for time alone in his Highland retreat with Helen, his curvaceous companion and all-round good sport. But the past intrudes, first when the acquittal of a suspected child murderer brings back memories of the case, and later when an old flame of Rex's turns up on the doorstep. Challinor skillfully choreographs all of this, and yet the novel's tension, like the weather, remains soggy. Even the obligatory murder, arriving right on cue, can't dispel the narcotic effect of yet another lethally cozy plot. Anna Mundow is a freelance journalist and critic. Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top Recent Stories    TRUE YOU: A Journey to Finding and Loving Yourself    READING OBAMA: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition    MY FATHER'S FORTUNE    THE FEAR: Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe    THE SOCIAL ANIMAL: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement	Quick Clicks FREE Presentation: Weird Tips and Tricks for a Lean Body and Flat Tummy! Cook the healthy way - no grease or oil - New Orgreenic Kitchenware - See Video Eliminate Windows PC Errors Improve PC's System Speed by Up to 70%
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"True You" and "Reading Obama"

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Washington Post Book Reviews For You Monday April 4, 2011 TRUE YOU: A Journey to Finding and Loving Yourself Janet Jackson, with David Ritz Gallery ISBN 978-1416587248 259 pages $25.99 Reviewed by Michael Gross Janet Jackson's "True You" boasts alluring packaging: It's printed on the kind of ultra-white paper you rarely see in books anymore, chock-full of photos and beautifully designed. Fans of pop-star nonfiction will inevitably be drawn to it. But despite its sheen, it's no revealing "Life" (Keith Richards) or "Chronicles" (Bob Dylan). Instead, it's a mash-up of celebrity tell-nothing, dysfunction memoir and Oprah-ready self-help. Its biggest revelations? Jackson loves rainy days, hopes she's finally conquered a long-standing body-image issue and calls her late brother -- who had body-image issues of his own, although they go unmentioned -- "Mike." Clearly, the publisher of "True You" assumes that a slight book by a sometimes not-so-slight superstar will still sell to Jackson fans, and although that's cynical, it's also true. Despite its lack of narrative heft, it's bulked up with reprinted fan letters, sob stories from Jackson friends, a 14-page memo from her nutritionist and 70 pages of recipes. My advice: If you want to know who she really is, cue up Jackson's "Control" or "Rhythm Nation" instead. Here's the gist of her message, repeated like a disco beat: Despite wealth and fame, she was always miserable. Even as the world thought she was beautiful and talented, she thought she was a fat disappointment, and her loving family, although they instilled the fearsome Jackson work ethic in her -- and she loves them for it -- never addressed or even acknowledged her issues. "Because ours was a show business family, we were pretty much on our own," she writes in a devastating off-hand admission. "Other than the extremely rare holiday dinner, we didn't have regular sit-down meals." So she became "the kind of kid who ate anything and everything. ... Food was everything warm and wonderful." Food was, in fact, a facsimile of family. "My parents were overwhelmed with responsibilities." Yet, in her telling, they were quite irresponsible. "My siblings and I grew up with the belief that you don't let people know what's going on inside. ... Fans paid hard-earned money to watch us perform, and our job was to make them happy. End of story." Until she realized, all on her own, that it was only the beginning. Janet's long-sought solution? Look in the mirror, like Al Franken's Stuart Smalley, and repeat, "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, people like me!" When my attention flagged during the sort of anecdotes politicians use to connect with the masses, the thought of Smalley's faux earnestness kept me reading. Unfortunately, she is serious. To be fair, she sends a clear signal on the second page: "This is not an autobiography. It's a journey that I am still taking to love and to accept myself just as I am." Alas, almost from the start of her career -- on the sitcom "Good Times" -- outside forces conspired to make the then-10-year-old hate herself. "I was told," she writes, "I needed to bind my breasts. ... For a girl so young, this was confusing (but) there was no room for personal confusion." "Please believe me: my struggles are real," she continues on page four. "Depression leads to overeating." Luckily, by page seven, she subtly foreshadows a happy ending. "In 2008, I lost ... sixty pounds, but gained something far more valuable: a love and appreciation for myself that I will never lose." Bless you, Dr. Smalley. What Jackson most wants us to know is that really, she's just like us. As a child, she compared herself unfavorably with her sister and was teased by that Mike guy, who gave her ample posterior -- often referred to as her booty -- "pet names." Not Bubbles, I hope. But I'm being churlish. Three decades ago, a giant marketing firm studying book-buying in the United States concluded that the more people read, the more they will read. In other words, if a book, no matter how empty of calories, draws people in, they might buy another and another, and maybe try one with some nutritional value. So please, Janet Jackson fans, ignore all the above. I heartily recommend "True You." Buy it. And more books like it. And maybe some that are unlike it, too. Michael Gross is the author of "Model," "740 Park," "Rogues' Gallery" and the forthcoming "Unreal Estate." Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top READING OBAMA: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition READING OBAMA: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political TraditionJames T. Kloppenberg Princeton Univ ISBN 978-0691147468 302 pages $24.95 DECONSTRUCTING OBAMA: The Life, Loves, and Letters of America's First Postmodern President  Jack Cashill Threshold ISBN 978-1451611113 343 pages $25 Reviewed by Craig Fehrmanis Politicians have long exploited the symbolic power of books. In "Six Crises" (1962), Richard Nixon wrote of a conversation with newly elected President John F. Kennedy. "Every public man should write a book," Kennedy told Nixon, "because it tends to elevate him in popular esteem to the respected status of an 'intellectual.'" There are other reasons for politicians to write books -- profit and public exposure. But the accolades from a tale well-told can burnish an image, as Kennedy found with "Profiles in Courage" (1955), and Barack Obama discovered with "Dreams from My Father" (1995) and "The Audacity of Hope" (2006). The influence of books lies at the heart of two new ones about President Obama. They take very different approaches and reach very different conclusions about the president, his intellect and his politics. In "Reading Obama," James Kloppenberg, a professor of intellectual history at Harvard, studies not only Obama's own writings but also the writers who shaped his thinking. Kloppenberg interviewed Obama's professors, examined articles he edited while president of the Harvard Law Review and analyzed his two books. The president's books provide the hook and organizing principle for "Reading Obama." Kloppenberg is attracted to the political and historical aspects of "The Audacity of Hope," and that book plays a larger role in his analysis than "Dreams From My Father." He writes that "Audacity" is "often dismissed, incorrectly, as a typical piece of campaign fluff." But in Kloppenberg's eyes, the book reveals Obama to be a philosopher-president, someone whose peers include Adams, Jefferson, Lincoln and Wilson. His reading of Obama convinces him that the president fuses "three distinct developments": the American democratic tradition, the philosophy of pragmatism, and the academic debates that defined campuses during his educational years. Each contributed to the president's desire for compromise and consensus. Kloppenberg's method does not always provide original insight into Obama's ideas, but it does reveal the careful, career-long thought behind them. For instance, Obama's commitment to pragmatism -- what Kloppenberg calls "philosophical pragmatism" as opposed to Bill Clinton's "vulgar pragmatism" -- requires him to admit that, sometimes, it doesn't offer the best solution. "It has not always been the pragmatist," Obama writes in "Audacity," who "has created the conditions for liberty." In a 2006 story for Time, Joe Klein counted more than 50 of these "on the one hand ... on the other hand" formulations in Obama's book. Klein saw them as a sign of the then-senator's political savvy. But "Reading Obama" suggests they were something else: the result of a sincere and coherent worldview. Kloppenberg works through many influences on Obama, from James Madison to Gordon Wood's scholarship on Madison, in a style that is clear, methodical and dry. (One exception comes in his wonderfully barbed asides about the Washington media.) But "Reading Obama" also delivers terrific capsule histories of the movements and individuals who had an impact on the president -- the turmoil in legal studies in the 1980s, figures ranging from John Rawls to Clifford Geertz. This is not a beach read, but it will teach you much about Obama. In contrast to Kloppenberg, Jack Cashill takes a withering view of Obama as an author. He complains that the president's books contribute to "the foundational myth of Obama as genius." In "Deconstructing Obama," he presents his thesis that Obama did not write his books and that he turned to "unrepentant terrorist" Bill Ayers for assistance. Cashill, an author and blogger who has a doctorate in American Studies, argues that Obama was "desperate" in 1994 for help in finishing his overdue first book, "Dreams From My Father," and turned to Ayers. Recognizing Obama as a politically sympathetic up-and-comer, Ayers agreed to write or rewrite parts and to edit others. Like all politicians, Obama got plenty of help with his speeches and, when it came time for his second book, "Audacity," he encouraged his staff to ape Ayers -- and even brought back the man himself to ghostwrite the book's prologue and much of its epilogue. To support this theory, Cashill relies on various types of evidence: chronological (Obama's schedule didn't allow enough time to write either book); biographical (Christopher Andersen's "Barack and Michelle" has two unnamed sources who say Ayers helped Obama); statistical (computer-generated comparisons of Obama's prose with that of Ayers and other writers); and, most of all, stylistic (Obama and Ayers both rely on "the language of the sea," though only Ayers comes from a nautical background). While Cashill strives for a scholarly tone, he packages "Deconstructing Obama" as a memoir-detective story, moving from his initial discovery of Ayers' role in 2008 to his sleuthing out purported facts about the literary relationship between the two men. Cashill's clues are far from convincing. Cashill believes that the similarity between the two men's "imagery" and "structure" is by itself "almost enough to convict" Obama of his charges. For example, Ayers writes in his memoir, "Fugitive Days:" "The confrontation in the Fishbowl flowed like a swollen river into the teach-in, carrying me along the cascading waters from room to room, hall to hall, bouncing off boulders." In "Dreams," Obama writes the following passage: "I heard all our voices begin to run together, the sound of three generations tumbling over each other like the currents of a slow-moving stream, my questions like rocks roiling the water, the breaks in memory separating the currents." "Deconstructing Obama" includes many more flimsy examples of stylistic overlap: Obama and Ayers both misquote a line from Carl Sandburg's famous poem "Chicago"; they both misspell the name of a city in South Africa (though they misspell it in different ways); they both love the words "flutter" and "ragged." Cashill bends or invents evidence to fit his theories and further undercuts his argument with errors of fact and interpretation. He attacks the media for ignoring Andersen's book, to which Cashill says Obama gave his "tacit blessing." But the White House, in fact, so disliked the book that it canceled a staffer's CNN appearance because the network booked Andersen -- and then quizzed him about the Ayers connection. "Deconstructing Obama" is distressing also for what it reveals about the publishing industry. Cashill details how the media, including conservative outlets such as Fox News and the National Review, ignored his research. Yet he has now published a book with the conservative imprint of Simon & Schuster, one of the biggest houses in the country. Books may be our most sophisticated and important medium -- Kloppenberg's volume offers proof of that -- but Cashill's work should remind us that books also are not nearly as accountable as they ought to be. Anything that sells is fit to print, even if it is as grotesque, delusional and paranoid as "Deconstructing Obama." You can't trust a book by its cover. That's a point Cashill set out to make -- and did so, thoroughly, though not in the way he intended. Craig Fehrmanis working on a book about presidents and their books. Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top Advertisement Stimulus Grant Approval.com - Billions in Aid Available Did you know our government gives away billions of dollars to people just like you? These grants have application deadlines and many are coming up. Don't miss your chance to get some of this money. Government grants were created to help citizens that are in need of government assistance. Now is the time to act. Don't let this money go unclaimed. Government resources are available for your benefit. If you are eligible, this grant money can help you cover all of your living costs, college tuition, or even your medical expenses! Find Money Now! 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