T.S. Eliot

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New Books Newsletter For You Sunday September 26, 2010 Today is the anniversary of the birth of T.S. Eliot T.S. Eliot (Sept. 26, 1888 - Jan. 4, 1965) Thomas Stearns Eliot studied at Harvard, and spent much of his academic life learning ancient languages in order to read various religious texts. He wrote one of his moust famous poems, "The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock," when he was only 22, and shocked many traditionalist of his day. Eliot's other works include "The Waste Land," "Four Quartets" (considered by himself alone to be his masterpiece), and the widely known "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats" - which later became the basis for the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical "Cats." He died in 1965 of emphysema, and his ashes were scattered in the church in his ancestors' hometown of East Coker. Featured Book and Quizzes Featured book by T.S. Eliot: Poems This week's quizzes: Emily Dickinson Poetry First Lines Who Was Shakespeare? This Week's Birthdays Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra -- September 29, 1547 Writer best known as the creator of the legendary literary figure Don Quixote. Read more about Cervantes. Read Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra at BookDaily. Truman Capote -- September 30, 1924 Novelist and short story writer who gained fame for his novel In Cold Blood. Read The Complete Stories of Truman Capote at BookDaily. Graham Greene -- October 2, 1904 English novelist and playwright whose works focused on moral issues in political settings. Read The Spy's Bedside Book by Graham Greene at BookDaily.	Quick Clicks "Your Belly or Your Life!" said Doc. See How I Lose It (Vid) Free Tee Shirts, Wristbands, and More! Students, Moms! Dream Job - Paid Surveys, Focus Groups at Home. PT/FT Your choice.
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"Fall of Giants" and "The Widowers Tale"

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Washington Post Book Reviews For You Sunday September 26, 2010 FALL OF GIANTS Ken Follett Dutton ISBN 978 0 525 95165 0 985 pages $36 Reviewed by William Sheehan In 1989, Ken Follett, author of such phenomenally popular thrillers as "Eye of the Needle" and "The Key to Rebecca," moved in a new direction by publishing "The Pillars of the Earth," a vast, intricate account of the building of a cathedral in medieval England. "Pillars" has since become one of Follett's most widely read novels. Together with its equally vast sequel, "World Without End," it established its author as a master of the pop historical epic. Follett will surely solidify that reputation with "Fall of Giants," the first installment of a hugely ambitious work-in-progress called The Century Trilogy. Weighing in at nearly 1,000 pages and sporting an initial printing of 1 million copies, "Fall of Giants" is, in every way, a Big Book. As the series title indicates, it recounts -- or begins to recount -- the chaotic history of the 20th century. Just as Herman Wouk did in "The Winds of War" and "War and Remembrance," Follett creates a large cast of fictional characters and deploys them across the globe, using their private experiences to illuminate the catastrophic events that marked the early years of the century. The narrative begins in 1911, with the coronation of King George V in England, and ends in 1924, by which time the world has changed in unimaginable ways. The centerpiece of the story is the apocalyptic drama of World War I, which escalated from a local Balkan conflict to a global conflagration that claimed 16 million lives. Secondary public dramas include the protracted struggle for women's suffrage and the ongoing battle between the working class and an increasingly irrelevant aristocracy, a battle that found its apotheosis in the Russian Revolution of 1917. Set against this historical panorama are the intertwined lives of dozens of characters, all of them shaped -- and sometimes warped -- by the pressures of class, gender, politics and war. Billy and Ethel Williams are siblings who move from the hardscrabble world of the Welsh coal mines to the radical political movements of the day. Another pair of siblings, Earl and Maud Fitzherbert, are wealthy members of the landed gentry whose opposing worldviews lead them to vastly different destinies. Gus Dewar is an idealistic young American who serves both in Woodrow Wilson's White House and the trenches of France. Walter von Ulrich is an aristocratic German with emotional ties to England and conflicting ties of loyalty to the Fatherland. Grigori and Lev Peshkov are brothers left orphaned -- and embittered -- by atrocities committed in the name of the czar. One will find his way to America and a life of crime, the other to a prominent position in Lenin's Bolshevik Party. These are the central players, and their complex relationships encompass secret marriages, upstairs-downstairs romances, ill-timed pregnancies and assorted acts of love, lust and betrayal. Unfortunately, these personal elements offer some of the most awkward, least convincing moments in the novel. Follett is neither a master of subtle characterization nor an elegant stylist. (A beautiful woman's eyes "twinkled with mischief," while a frightened soldier's "heart missed a beat.") In addition, the frequent erotic interludes are often overwrought, overheated and, at moments, silly. Despite all this, "Fall of Giants" offers pleasures that more than compensate for its lack of literary finesse. Follett may not be Tolstoy, but he knows how to tell a compelling, well-constructed story. Once its basic elements are in place, the narrative acquires a cumulative, deceptively effortless momentum. Follett is particularly adept at balancing multiple storylines, patiently building a portrait of interconnected lives. And he consistently gets the physical details right. "Fall of Giants" gains much of its credibility through its precise description of a wide range of settings: the coal mines of Wales, the manor houses of the rich and over-privileged, the factories and hovels of pre-revolutionary Russia, and the bloody squalor of life in the trenches of the Western Front. Perhaps the major reasons for the novel's ultimate success are Follett's comprehensive grasp of the historical record and his ability to integrate research into a colorful, engaging narrative. He's especially effective in describing the build-up to the war, when all hopes of peaceful resolution gradually faded, when arrogance, patriotic belligerence and monumental shortsightedness paved the way for the series of catastrophes that would dominate the coming decades. As the novel ends, Germany is struggling with runaway inflation and sinking beneath the demands of the Treaty of Versailles. A new political movement called National Socialism is on the rise, and a fiery young orator named Adolf Hitler is beginning to find his voice. Much has changed, and much will continue to change. Follett's recreation of those changes will occupy his next two volumes. If they are as lively and entertaining as "Fall of Giants," they should be well worth waiting for. William Sheehan is the author of "At the Foot of the Story Tree: An Inquiry Into the Fiction of Peter Straub." Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top THE WIDOWER'S TALE Julia Glass Pantheon ISBN 978-0307377920 402 pages $25.95 Reviewed by Donna Rifkind Julia Glass gets plenty of things right in her expansive fourth novel, but no feature is more successful than the book's artfully conjured milieu. In most cases, and especially in Glass' books, "milieu" means not just an environment but a prevailing mood. Here, that mood is giddy bewilderment. In a 2006 interview with NPR, Glass -- who won the 2002 National Book Award for her first novel, "Three Junes" -- said, "I see life as increasingly complex, vivid, colorful, crazy, chaotic, and that's the world I write about -- the world that I live in." This is certainly the world of the 70-year-old widower in Glass' latest tale, a Massachusetts retiree named, more whimsically than his Yankee uprightness might seem to suggest, Percy Darling. "Colorful, crazy, chaotic": These are the hues of Percy's sunset years as he tries, and fails, to maintain some hint of stability while going about the business of filling his days in a "fashionably rural" Boston suburb called Matlock. (I kept waiting for some winking reference to the geriatric TV drama, but Glass has left this fictional town's moniker, maybe too subtly, alone.) Percy has lived in Matlock for over four decades, raising two daughters in a 250-year-old house that's of keen interest to the local historic preservation society. Until his recent retirement, he worked as a reference liaison at Harvard's Widener Library, devoting many years to solitary parenthood after his wife drowned in a grievous accident more than 30 years ago. Now in their 40s, his daughters have children of their own; the eldest grandchild, a winning Harvard sophomore named Robert, is Percy's much-loved favorite. Except for his plain devotion to Robert, there's little that doesn't complicate Percy's daily life. His older daughter, who recently abandoned her husband and two young children in Brooklyn, has returned home to Matlock without much of a plan. In response, Percy has agreed to lease his huge, picturesque barn to a local preschool called Elves & Fairies, with the provision that his daughter be given a job there. The hubbub surrounding the barn's renovation is discomfiting enough for Percy, who likes his quiet routines. Then even more unruliness arises in the shape of an unexpected new romance, the first he has allowed himself since his wife died. Percy's love affair with Sarah, an artist in her early 50s who's raising a young son by herself, plays out amid a tangle of small-town coincidences. Sarah's son attends the Elves & Fairies school, whose elaborate treehouse Percy's grandson Robert is helping to design. Things become knottier when Sarah, prompted by a health scare, consults a prominent Boston physician who just happens to be Percy's younger daughter. Fortunately for readers, these complications feel natural. "Odd is the flavor of my life these days," muses Percy. "I've decided to roll with it." His story would be engaging enough on its own, but despite its Chaucerian title, there are many more stories here than just this widower's tale. In a typical Glass technique, the author weaves Percy's first-person narration in and out of several other alternating points of view. We hear from Robert, whose friendship with an impassioned environmental activist might compromise his brilliant Harvard career; Celestino, a Guatemalan gardener with a thorny past and a justifiable fear of deportation; and Ira, a teacher at Elves & Fairies who's conflicted about making a permanent commitment to his boyfriend, a high-end divorce lawyer. Each strand of this narrative macrame is surprisingly supple, offering a convincing illusion of lives roundly lived. The effect is one of remarkable expansiveness, in which a rather modest small-town story is able to incorporate all kinds of contemporary social issues, including illegal immigration, eco-terrorism, health-care coverage, divorce and gay marriage. As she did in "Three Junes" and "The Whole World Over" (but did not manage to do in her strangely constricted last book, "I See You Everywhere"), Glass propels her characters through a world that is sometimes dire but also sweetly normal and often joyful. It's the Glass-half-full version of Lorrie Moore's grief-stricken novel "A Gate at the Stairs." Nothing about this many-dimensioned illusion is easy to create, and some elements here are weaker than others -- notably the dialogue. The older characters sometimes lapse into "On Golden Pond" parodies, and Glass gets the lively, profane patter of college students entirely wrong. Even so, it's wonderful to see Glass recover the unforced flow of her first two novels, a rhythm that convincingly imitates the shifting fortunes and allegiances of daily life. Once again, she's proved to be a master of milieu, an old French word that means "middle place" -- the place in which all her characters, young and old, continue to engage with the world and where she, a novelist in midcareer, keeps refining their stories. Donna Rifkind is a writer in Los Angeles. Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top Recent Stories    AMERICAN DREAMS: The United States Since 1945    TURBULENCE    DICKINSON: Selected Poems and Commentaries    HAROLD VARMUS: A DICKENSIAN IN THE LAB    THE LADY MATADOR'S HOTEL	Quick Clicks "Your Belly or Your Life!" said Doc. See How I Lose It (Vid) Free Tee Shirts, Wristbands, and More! Students, Moms! Dream Job - Paid Surveys, Focus Groups at Home. PT/FT Your choice.
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"American Dreams" and "Turbulence"

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Washington Post Book Reviews For You Saturday September 25, 2010 AMERICAN DREAMS: The United States Since 1945 H. W. Brands Penguin Press ISBN 978-1594202629 420 pages $32.95 Reviewed by Charles Kaiser The story of the United States since 1945 offers a historian the opportunity to mine a rich narrative of steady change and dramatic transformation. With the end of World War II now 65 years behind us -- and all of the 1960s at least 40 years old -- this ought be a good time to offer new information and fresh insights into the political, social and cultural events that re-invented the country in the postwar period. "American Dreams" appropriately dates the beginning of the modern era to the first explosion of an atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert in July 1945. Here, H.W. Brands, a history professor at the University of Texas, does a good job of making the familiar seem fresh: "Many of the observers were struck by the silence that surrounded the detonation. The astonishing display of light and color took place without a soundtrack -- until the sonic waves reached the observation posts many seconds after the light waves." As J. Robert Oppenheimer, the project's director, wrote: "I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture ... 'Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or the other." Oppenheimer's remark is famous, of course, and the author's one consistent success in this volume is to recall most of the famous quotations associated with most of the important events of these seven decades. Thus, we are reminded of everything from Joseph Welch's chastisement of Sen. Joe McCarthy ("Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?") to President Dwight Eisenhower's sadly unheeded warning at the end of his administration ("The very structure of our society (is involved). We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence ... by the military-industrial complex.") and Norman Mailer's early assessment of John F. Kennedy in Esquire ("His personal quality had a subtle, not quite describable intensity."). But when it comes to using the past to understand the present, Brands has hardly anything to say at all. For instance, he quotes Walter Lippmann's warnings about the danger of the United States over-extending itself in the 1950s: Our clients "will act for their reasons, and on their own judgment, presenting us with accomplished facts which we did not intend, and with crises for which we are unready. We shall have either to disown our puppets ... or must support them at an incalculable cost on an unintended, unforeseen and perhaps undesirable issue." But the author never connects that wise, 60-year-old warning to our current situation in Afghanistan. Instead of broad themes about the direction of American history, Brands offers an endless series of mini-portraits of major events, without ever finding a way of tying any of them together. And when he does try to make a larger point, he often stumbles. For example, he writes that Vietnam "seared itself on the American mind, replacing the Munich syndrome with a Vietnam syndrome. The former had said that when in doubt, America must fight. The latter asserted that when in doubt, America mustn't." That abbreviated summary is fine as far it goes. But then Brands adds this meaningless sentence: "Neither did much to diminish the doubt, the source of all the trouble." From this distance, it is obvious to this reviewer that the misuse of the Munich precedent led the United States into a costly misadventure in Vietnam, while the "Vietnam syndrome" imposed a welcome restraint on American interventionism -- until the neocon movement insisted on "getting beyond it" so that we could once again waste billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives (ours and our enemies') in endless interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. But Brands always avoids those broader judgments. Sometimes his capsule descriptions of famous events omit important facts and long-revealed ironies. For example, he notes that Lyndon Johnson got rid of defense secretary Robert McNamara when his enthusiasm for the Vietnam War had disappeared. Then the author adds: "But McNamara's successor was no more upbeat. Clark Clifford told Johnson ... that Vietnam had become a 'sinkhole.'" All of that is true, but it omits the main reason Clifford's assessment as the new secretary of defense carried so much weight: It was a complete reversal of what his position on the war had been when Johnson had chosen him to be McNamara's successor just a few weeks earlier. Similarly, Brands writes that Chicago Mayor Richard Daley "deemed the anti-war protesters the scum of the earth" when they descended on his city during the Democratic National Convention of 1968 -- but he leaves out the long-known irony that Daley himself hated the Vietnam War because the son of a close friend had been one of its casualties. In the same section, Brands reports that demonstrators provoked the Chicago police with taunts of "Pigs, pigs, fascist pigs," but he never mentions that Freedom of Information suits filed by CBS News led the network to conclude 10 years later that as many as one out of six of those demonstrators was actually a government agent. Brands does a passable job of summarizing the facts behind major political events, but when it comes to social and cultural change, he never has anything interesting to say. The author avoids controversy so assiduously that his book sometimes reads as if its main purpose were to win acceptance by the Texas Board of Education, which decides what facts are appropriate for high school history books. The journalist Molly Ivins once wrote, "It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America." The women's movement and the civil rights movement both get standard treatment in Brands' book, but the gay rights movement is barely mentioned at all. Yet the transformed status of women, African-Americans and gay people during the last seven decades, produced by the struggle Ivins described, is the most important story of change in the United States in the 20th century. No one would get any hint of that narrative from this volume. At the end of 385 pages of text, all Brands has to tell us is this: "Americans had dreamed since our national birth, and in the twenty-first century we were dreaming still." Historical judgments don't get any more banal than that. Charles Kaiser is the author of "1968 In America" and "The Gay Metropolis." He writes the Full Court Press blog for the Sidney Hillman Foundation. Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top TURBULENCE Giles Foden Knopf ISBN 978-0307592774 315 pages $25.95 Reviewed by Wendy Smith As demonstrated in his Whitbread Award-winner, "The Last King of Scotland," which rendered Ugandan dictator Idi Amin through the eyes of his personal physician, British author Giles Foden has a knack for strong setups. Foden's new novel has an equally striking premise: In January 1944, a young meteorologist is dispatched to gain the confidence of a scientist whose accurate weather-forecasting could be crucial to choosing a date for D-Day. The younger man, Henry Meadows, is a Cambridge-educated whiz kid who just might be able to understand the system for measuring turbulence devised by Wallace Ryman, a pacifist who does not wish to share his knowledge with military officials planning the invasion of France. Meadows is also arrogant, insecure and socially maladroit. These qualities aren't exactly pluses on such a delicate assignment, but much of the novel's interest comes from exploring Meadows' damaged psyche, slowly unfolded in his own words as the novel's narrator. Unfortunately, the plot is not as interesting as this premise. Events crawl as Meadows sets up his cover, taking weather readings from a station near Ryman's home in Scotland. During their uneasy encounters, he displays no great skill at winning the scientist's trust and no great sense of urgency about his mission. D-Day recedes into the background in a lackadaisical narrative studded with dull scientific and meteorological exposition. The framing device, which presents Meadows' story as recollections set down in 1980, further muddies the narrative waters by yanking readers out of the moment to reveal the future of selected characters. A poker-playing American meteorologist and a scientist obsessed with constructing a ship from ice are among the promising secondary figures who remain frustratingly opaque, viewed through Meadows' self-absorbed lens. An out-of-the-blue death finally sends the action into higher gear, and some of the novel's better scenes occur after Meadows is assigned to a hapless officer charged with reconciling conflicting meteorological data into a coherent recommendation for the Allied commanders. At least this pressing task gets Meadows out of his self-pitying funk -- until, confronted by an angry relative of a man he accidentally killed, he whines, "Was I never to be free of this event from what already now seemed like another life?" After this repellent outburst, it's difficult to feel much excitement when he plays a key role in using Ryman's system to make the vital call about D-Day. Foden's talent and commitment are evident in scattered moments, including some lovely passages describing the Scottish landscape and lyrical metaphysical musings about the significance of turbulence. But his synthesis of psychology, philosophy and science within the framework of a wartime mission doesn't come off. Wendy Smith, a contributing editor of the American Scholar, reviews books frequently for the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune. Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top Recent Stories    DICKINSON: Selected Poems and Commentaries    HAROLD VARMUS: A DICKENSIAN IN THE LAB    THE LADY MATADOR'S HOTEL    ZERO HISTORY    APE HOUSE	Quick Clicks Free Six Pack Of Tasters Choice Coffee Get 2 Dell Mini Notebooks - FREE! One For You and One For the Kids - Click Now - Participation Required. Shocking Foods that Burn Belly Fat - FREE Fat Loss Tips Presentation:
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"A Dickensian in the Lab," more

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Washington Post Book Reviews For You Friday September 24, 2010 DICKINSON: Selected Poems and Commentaries Helen Vendler Harvard Univ ISBN 978 0 674-04867-6 535 pages $35 Reviewed by Michael Dirda. Visit Dirda's online book discussion at washingtonpost.com/readingroom. Any good bookstore is likely to offer a half-dozen different editions of Emily Dickinson's poetry. But the reason to consider buying "Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries" lies, of course, in the commentator, Helen Vendler. Vendler -- A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard -- is widely regarded as our finest living critic and champion of contemporary poetry. Many would say of poetry, period, since she has produced important studies of half the Western canon, from Shakespeare's sonnets and George Herbert's metaphysical verse to the work of Keats, Whitman, Yeats, Stevens, Plath, Heaney and Ashbery. Vendler's sheer appetite for poetry and her explicatory power are phenomenal. She is, however, a thoroughly serious, academic critic. Now, some professors are fun to read: Think of the cool Olympian clarity of Northrop Frye, the astonishing encyclopedism of Hugh Kenner, the delicious precisions of Guy Davenport, the Empsonian dash and brilliance of Christopher Ricks. Vendler's strength, meanwhile, lies in clearly, patiently explaining what's happening in a poem. But -- and it's a big but -- you really do need to pay attention. As Vendler writes in her introduction to "Dickinson," hers isn't so much a book to read through as "a book to be browsed in, as the reader becomes interested in one or another of the poems commented on here." Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) left nearly 1,800 poems. "In some passionate years," notes Vendler, "she wrote almost a poem a day." Dickinson never married -- "Myself the only Kangaroo among the Beauty" -- and to all appearances seemed just a shy, reclusive spinster, a good Christian woman residing quietly in Amherst, Mass. But her inner life was quite different, hardly Christian and not at all conventional. In the view of eminent critic Harold Bloom, Dickinson's was simply "the best mind to appear among Western poets in nearly four centuries." Yet, aside from the handful of poems that appeared anonymously in local newspapers, she never published her work. Most of it survives either in manuscripts or from transcriptions in letters, mainly to her family. When first brought out in book form, her generally short, gnomic verses were often regularized. Words were altered when their meaning was deemed puzzling or sacrilegious, and Dickinson's beloved dashes, her preferred form of punctuation, were frequently changed to commas or periods. Only in 1955 did Thomas Johnson produce a scholarly edition that printed the earliest fair copy of what Dickinson actually wrote. His were the standard texts until Ralph Franklin's 1998 "Variorum Edition," which chose Dickinson's last revised versions as its copy-texts but also included the manuscript variants. Such bibliographic details matter because, like Marianne Moore and W.H. Auden, Dickinson frequently fiddled with and reworked her seemingly finished poems. Vendler relies on Franklin for her texts, but notes that sometimes the poet's rejected first versions, found in Johnson, display a raw power all their own. For instance, the line "And this brief Tragedy of Flesh" was slightly altered in meaning and distinctly weakened to "this brief Drama in the flesh." The first sounds grandly Shakespearean, the second merely descriptive. Dickinson's poetry, summarizes Vendler, is "epigrammatic, terse, abrupt, surprising, unsettling, flirtatious, savage, winsome, metaphysical, provocative, blasphemous, tragic, funny." As many readers know, her opening lines are especially startling: "One need not be a Chamber -- to be Haunted -- " "Wild Nights -- Wild Nights!" "After great pain, a formal feeling comes -- " "Because I could not stop for Death -- / He kindly stopped for me" "My Life had stood -- a Loaded Gun -- " "Crumbling is not an instant's Act" "Tell all the truth but tell it slant -- " Dickinson famously called one of her poems "my letter to the World / That never wrote to Me," and occasionally she sounds as personal as a diary, but more often she pares her lines until they are as ambiguous and richly compacted as a Zen koan. Take this blasphemous little poem, as Vendler calls it: "In name of the Bee -- / And of the Butterfly -- / And of the Breeze -- Amen!" While this invocation naturalizes the Trinitarian formula of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, it doesn't wholly abandon it. Dickinson is careful that her nouns are "symbolic as well as 'real'; the Bee (for Being), the Butterfly (Psyche, the resurrected Soul) and the Breeze (the Spirit) all fit that criterion." While Vendler's readings are generally clear and persuasive, some are not. In discussing "A Clock Stopped," she spends a confusing paragraph on the movement of a clock's hour hand, positing a "circle" of 120 "Degrees" and a clock face marked out in increments of 10 spaces. This isn't any kind of timepiece I have ever seen. In another poem she explains Dickinson's use of the noun "Ought" as her "customary spelling of 'Aught,' meaning 'Anything.'" OK. But in a poem that begins "The Zeros taught," it does seem possible that "Ought" might actually mean zero, as in the phrase "nineteen ought two." Vendler also has a tendency to connect Dickinson's language to that of earlier (and later) poets or to the Bible, sometimes without adequate evidence and purpose. Take the poem "It's easy to invent a Life": Here the word "thrifty" leads her to cite Hamlet's phrase "Thrift, thrift, Horatio" -- for no reason I can discern -- while the poem's reference to "Perished Patterns" somehow calls up the phrase "so various, so beautiful, so new" from Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach." This, in its turn, is followed by a nod to Gerard Manley Hopkins' use of the word "haecceitas," referring to an entity's individual "thisness," which, Vendler reminds us, he borrowed from the medieval philosopher Duns Scotus. All this quote-mongering seems to be little more than the kind of free association that all great readers -- and many classroom teachers -- are prone to. For Vendler really is a great reader and teacher. Consider her superb analysis -- too long to reproduce -- of "Essential Oils -- are wrung." Or look at her discussion of the famous poem about heaven "I never saw a Moor": She points out that its last lines ("Yet certain am I of the spot / As if the Checks were given -- ") refer to train tickets, thus making Paradise nearby, just a few stops down the line from Amherst. Older editors had emended "checks" to "chart," thus losing the homely simile. Again, in her glossing of "To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee," Vendler neatly picks apart Dickinson's verbal games with the article "a" and the number "one." Emily Dickinson is certainly never going to be an easy poet to understand, but her dense, poignant lyrics are now a lot more accessible to ordinary readers thanks to Vendler's unravelings. If you're going to read Dickinson, this "selected poems and commentary" is the place to start. Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top HAROLD VARMUS: A DICKENSIAN IN THE LAB ISBN NA Reviewed by Marie Arana The scientist of old cliche is a solitary, driven soul, laboring in isolation, far from the madding crowd. But human progress, as Galileo knew, is better served by a scientist who can walk the halls of power and spur the curiosity of a king. Few understand Galileo's instinct as well as Harold Varmus, who, as director of the National Institutes of Health from 1993-99, won Congress' attention, doubled the NIH's operating budget, and stimulated unparalleled growth. Like Galileo, he knows what it takes to kindle science. He grew up thinking he would be a writer. Born in Oceanside, N.Y., and raised in Freeport, he was a bookish child. His mother was a psychiatric social worker, his father "a Marcus Welby type" family doctor. Both were children of immigrants: she, of Austrian roots; he from a family of Poles. Educated at Wellesley and Harvard, they were "enlightened readers, although not particularly passionate about books." The boy found inspiration at his local library, "which, in time, became my second home." At school, teachers told him he had a way with words, the praise so convincing that he decided he had a future in English. "My ideal summer day," he says, "was reading on the porch." At first, the books were biographies of explorers, composers, scientists. By high school, they were "Gone With the Wind," "David Copperfield." At Amherst, he became interested in Victorian novelists. At Harvard graduate school, he did an M.A. thesis on how real life intruded in Dickens' work. But somewhere between a stint in a missionary hospital in India and his opposition to the Vietnam War, he chose medicine. The rest of Varmus' life is on the record: He worked with J. Michael Bishop at the University of California at San Francisco and earned a Nobel Prize for research on genes that cause cancer. After heading the NIH, he went on to become president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Last year, he published "The Art and Politics of Science." Just this July, President Obama named him director of the National Cancer Institute. And yet in his spare time -- when he isn't bicycling from Cleveland Park (D.C.), where he lives, to Bethesda, Md., where he works -- he reads Richard Holmes, Philip Roth, Jonathan Franzen. Science, like fiction, Varmus says, "is full of ferment and drama." The theories that strive to explain how cells become cancerous are highly competitive, as pitted against one another as life and death. If Galileo were alive today, he would understand Varmus' point. Exactly 400 years ago, Galileo dared to say that the sun was at the center of the universe. Just weeks ago, Varmus began his NCI tenure by saying that gene-based therapies may be the way to treat cancer. Science and literature do have a way of making you turn the page. Marie Arana can be reached at aranam(at symbol)washpost.com. Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top Recent Stories    THE LADY MATADOR'S HOTEL    ZERO HISTORY    APE HOUSE    GETTING TO HAPPY    THREE BOOKS ABOUT SCIENCE FICTION	Quick Clicks Free Six Pack Of Tasters Choice Coffee Free* $1,000 Sam's Gift Card - Claim Yours - participation required Discover Why the Every Other Day Diet's Weird Tips are Changing Lives!
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"The Lady Matador's Hotel," "Zero History," more

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Washington Post Book Reviews For You Thursday September 23, 2010 THE LADY MATADOR'S HOTEL Cristina Garcia Scribner ISBN 978 1 4391 8174 4 209 pages $24 Reviewed by Carolyn See, who reviews books regularly for The Washington Post Won Kim, a Korean textile manufacturer, and his pregnant, teenage peasant girlfriend, live in a hotel. So does Aura Estrada, a shapely waitress who used to be a leftist guerrilla in this Central American country's recent civil war. And Ricardo and Sarah, an American couple that came to this country to adopt a baby girl. And Gertrudis, the avaricious lawyer who handles many of this country's adoptions. And Col. Martin Abel, an officer in the country's victorious rightist army, whose favorite pastime is torturing people. (In fact, he once cruelly slaughtered Aura's little brother.) And Suki Palacios, the lady matador of the title, half Japanese, half Latina, former denizen of East Los Angeles, who's just arrived to participate in a women's bullfighting competition. And there's the unnamed country, which for decades has been no more than a playground for the American military to act out paranoid fantasies. And finally, there's the hotel, the Miraflor, elegant and fairly modern, and situated around a traditional Latin American courtyard that is lavishly studded with tropical plants, a swimming pool and a nice outdoor restaurant. Cristina Garcia has emulated the example of the venerable Vicki Baum, whose 1929 novel "Menschen im Hotel" followed the doings of residents in an elegant "Grand Hotel," as Edmund Goulding's classic movie version called it in 1932. The stately, iconographic movements of history were reduced to understandable size in Baum's novel by focusing on the individuals who passed through the revolving doors of the five-star establishment. And so, in "The Lady Matador's Hotel," we look at our Western Hemisphere and all its societal problems, beginning with the exploitation of minority workers. Won Kim, who inherited a textile factory from his father and is expecting the death of his mother, is now stuck in the fanciest suite in the hotel, waiting for a workers' strike to end and his child to be born. Baffled by the strike and suffering from severe depression, he's planning a deadly yachting jaunt: "When they are far out to sea and the captain is safely drunk, Won Kim will push Berta (his girlfriend) overboard. Then he will follow her." The colonel, on the other hand, dreams of sex and murder. He'd love to have sex with the lady matador, or, failing that, the shapely waitress. Then he'd like to drag them down to a dungeon and make them plead for their lives. That's life as he sees it. The waitress spits on his pork chops and gets an earful from her dead little brother, who tells her to murder this monster now that he's conveniently under her nose and relatively vulnerable. The adopting couple just hang around. Ricardo, the Cuban husband, writes awful verse ("As the island fades / I leave behind departure itself") and establishes a somewhat tenuous hold on his adopted baby, while the lawyer, an old-fashioned sharkish type, oversees a breeding farm of indigenous mothers and charges $30,000 for each infant she supplies, but she's suddenly faced with a shift in public opinion about whether or not what she's doing is a crime. In the forefront is the lady matador herself, Suki Palacios, a ritual-bound superwoman of sexuality and courage, who always makes it a point to sleep with someone different and eat a ripe pear before she fights the bulls. She's currently the talk of the town, but privately she broods over the death of her mother and frets over her womanizing dad. The story lasts for just seven days, and the end of each chapter gives us snippets of scattered news: "Leftist terrorists are trying to sow confusion and fear before the elections, but, mark my words, they won't succeed. I've made it my personal mission to stop them," the bloodthirsty colonel says on Channel 9. And there's also some astrology and celebrity chitchat. Against this trivia, the other, highly allegorical characters speak to each other in oracular aphorisms: "God is drunk and in the forest breaking all the rules," the adoption lawyer's husband says to her at one point, meaning ... what? When she isn't in her suit of lights, the lady matador dresses in a tiger-striped unitard. The colonel imagines her with "a dead zebra between her teeth," which would be quite a sight, if you think about it. I hope I'm wrong about this novel, but the allegory seems pretty heavy to me, and the characters stubbornly refuse to come alive. Yes, we know that the United States is considered by some people to be an imperialist disgrace -- exporting jobs, importing babies, using impoverished countries for our own military games -- but what is Garcia's actual point? Isn't there any kind of meaningful resistance to this beyond retreat into costume and ritual? The Korean manufacturer's girlfriend dresses up at one point in an 18th-century gown with a powdered wig. I wanted to ask: Why? And that tiger-striped unitard: Why? These people are meant to impersonate ideas, not human beings. But what's the author trying to say? I haven't the faintest idea. I hope that's my fault, not hers. Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top ZERO HISTORY William Gibson Putnam ISBN 978 0 399 15682 3 404 pages $26.95 Reviewed by Art Taylor, who reviews mysteries and thrillers frequently for The Washington Post The post-9/11 world has offered rich fodder for the most recent trio of novels from William Gibson: "Pattern Recognition" (2003), "Spook Country" (2007) and now "Zero History." While Gibson may be best known as the writer who coined the term "cyberspace" and kick-started a new chapter of science-fiction writing, even the most futuristic of his earlier books seemed relentlessly present-minded. These latest novels peruse aspects of a world as familiar as yesterday's headlines and yet also startlingly alien: competing trends toward globalization and isolation, marketing strategies as complex as military maneuvers (and not always unrelated), ubiquitous surveillance coupled with an urgent desire for privacy, and the lingering sense of conspiracies afoot across the globe. A doom-laden idea that everything may be connected persists even while individuals are striving, and often failing, for personal connections amid a technological wonderland. In many ways, "Zero History" serves as a sequel to "Spook Country" by reuniting most of that book's leading characters and hewing closely to its caper structure -- individual missions crossing and complicating one another, ultimately leading toward a showdown with much higher (if somewhat nebulous) stakes. In "Spook Country," what's at stake is the fate of misappropriated funds from the Federal Reserve, the balance of international economic structures and the truth about U.S. rebuilding efforts in Iraq. In "Zero History," it seems to be ... casual menswear? Megalomaniacal billionaire Hubertus Bigend (pronounced "Bayh-jhan," please) has become decidedly fashion-forward in this outing -- and not only because of his one-of-a-kind International Klein Blue suit (a color best described as "radioactive"). Noting that "military contracting was essentially recession-proof," he wants to horn in on the market -- and on the future of a much larger industrial enterprise. According to his analysts, "male streetwear generally, over the past fifty years or so ... had been more heavily influenced by the design of military clothing than by anything else." So with a few right moves, the future might be bright for Bigend's interests in "brand vision transmission, trend forecasting, vendor management, youth market recon, strategic planning in general." In South Carolina, after a previous job translating messages from a Cuban-Chinese crime syndicate, a recovering drug addict named Milgrim finds himself tracing the outlines of contraband camouflage trousers. Former music icon Hollis Henry, despite having sworn to avoid Bigend forever, is hired to locate the reclusive designer behind the Gabriel Hounds denim, a brand whose appeal has skyrocketed. Soon, these maneuvers attract the attention of a Department of Defense operative trying to safeguard national security and an international arms dealer looking to legitimize himself by landing military clothing contracts of his own. A final showdown brings these and other forces together under the watchful eye of floating surveillance platforms in the shape of a penguin and a manta ray, drifting around under Bigend's control, watching, listening and then rigged up to do quite a bit more. "Zero History" boasts an occasionally far-fetched frivolity and a greater lightness than some of Gibson's other novels. But if the plot seems a tad weightless at times (and not just because of floating penguins), the book proves momentous in other ways. Gibson remains as coolly incisive as ever in his observations, whether about technology or marketing or, yes, fashion: the "industrialization of novelty," the "semiotics of mass-produced American clothing," the construction of "parallel microeconomies, where knowledge is more congruent than wealth." Paranoia is "too much information," reflects Milgrim -- a definition that also explains Gibson's genius as a thinker and a stylist. His trenchant scrutiny of society and culture, and the relentless precision of his prose force us to see his world (and ours) with a troubling exactitude and an extra dose of unease. Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top APE HOUSE Sara Gruen Spiegel & Grau ISBN 978 0 385 52321 9 306 pages $26 Reviewed by Ron Charles, the fiction editor at The Washington Post. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/roncharles. His e-mail address is charlesr(at symbol)washpost.com. If we told all the animals in literature to shut up, the silence would be horrible. Sure, the serpent got our conversations off to an awkward start, but between the Garden of Eden and the Hundred Acre Wood, furry creatures have been some of our most cherished interlocutors. Who hasn't fantasized, along with Dr. Dolittle, that "if we could talk to the animals, just imagine it / Chatting to a chimp in chimpanzee"? But in real life, despite our superior intelligence, animals have made a lot more progress in learning our language than we've made in learning theirs. After all, most people have no idea what their dogs are barking, but even the scrappiest junkyard hound can follow a variety of human words. And remember back in 1998, the primordial days of the Internet, when Koko the gorilla conducted the first-ever interspecies chat over AOL with 8,000 subscribers? Although there are plenty of smart detractors, language research with animals continues to produce evidence of intelligent conversations that should remind us that we're not alone. As every member of every book club in America knows, halfway through Sara Gruen's "Water for Elephants," the narrator finally figures out how to communicate with a recalcitrant pachyderm in a Depression-era circus. (Look for the movie version in April starring Robert Pattinson and Reese Witherspoon.) Now, in her much-anticipated follow-up to that charming best-seller, Gruen addresses the subject of animal language even more directly. Jumping over those popular novels about detective cats and telepathic dogs, "Ape House" considers the capacity of animals to think and communicate from a scientific perspective. After visiting the Great Ape Trust in Des Moines, Gruen was inspired to set her new book in a similar laboratory, where scientists teach primates to use symbols and signs to carry on conversations. This research raises profound moral and philosophical questions about our relations with "every beast of the field," and I'm sympathetic to animals-rights arguments, even when they're corralled in works of fiction: Annie Proulx's "That Old Ace in the Hole" got me to swear off pork. Rob Levandoski's "Fresh Eggs" encouraged me to switch to the free-range variety. And I expect to keep moving toward vegetarianism as thoughtful writers show me the inhumanity of our cruel (and unhealthy) carnivorous diets. But unfortunately, beyond parroting a few animal rights platitudes, "Ape House" doesn't have much to say about the subject it raises so earnestly. Gruen investigated how apes learn human language and then inexplicably buried her discoveries under a silly thriller about a sad-sack journalist and a naive primate scientist. Too bad, because the opening chapters show just how much potential this story has to move and inform us. Philadelphia Inquirer reporter John Thigpen comes to Kansas City to write about developments at the Great Ape Language Lab. He has some idea of what's being done here with bonobos -- small, peaceful cousins of chimpanzees -- but the experience of communicating with them "changed his comprehension of the world in such a profound way that he could not yet articulate it. ... He'd looked into their eyes and recognized without a shadow of a doubt that sentient, intelligent beings were looking back." Gruen has a deep sympathetic regard for these bonobos -- they'll be your favorite characters, too -- and she conveys their playfulness and eager sexuality with great delight. To be sure, she anthropomorphizes them, but once an animal is actually talking with a human being, let's face it, that horse has left the barn. By showing the apes signing with John and their keeper, Dr. Isabel Duncan, Gruen gives a sense of the unsettling nature of their ability: just how revolutionary it is to realize that creatures we routinely imprison, infect and dissect are, in fact, intelligent and loving, capable of fear and empathy. It's a revelation that rejiggers your whole concept of personhood. As Dr. Duncan tells John, "Over the years, they've become more human, and I've become more bonobo." But soon something horrible happens -- to the apes and to the novel: Terrorists bomb the lab, Dr. Duncan barely survives, and her cowardly university, desperate to avoid further attacks, sells the animals to a notorious pornographer for a new reality TV show called "Ape House." At first, it seems that Gruen is resetting her novel as a zany satire of American culture, from media excess to medical ethics, with the poor apes standing in as the only humane creatures in a world gone mad. That could work, too, of course, but the author seems unwilling to provide anything more than rough sketches: The pornographer, his obscene ape TV show, the radical eco-protesters, the outrageous tabloid coverage -- it's all dashed off and obvious. Instead, the story insists on pursuing a couple of limp romantic crises, one about John and his depressed wife; the other involving Dr. Duncan and her fiance, who may be monkeying around with the wrong people. No opportunity for lachrymose melodrama is passed by: Even the African violets die a terrible death. The bonobos make a few more tantalizing appearances, but we remain caged in John's and Dr. Duncan's mopey stories while all the interesting action seems to be happening somewhere else. Particularly in a book inspired by the miracle of language, it's disappointing to see such reliance on cliches, as though the novel drove to the Costco Phrase Store and loaded up with off-the-shelf words. John "found the atmosphere intoxicating," or "lied copiously and through his teeth," or "wanted to shrink into the earth." Seeing the damage done to the lab was "like taking a cannonball to the gut. ... He knew he should try to collect himself, but at this point he had nothing to lose." Maybe these complaints sound like English-teacher pedantry, but the cumulative effect of such stylistic sloth is deadening. The 800-pound gorilla in the room is why someone at Gruen's new publishing house didn't give her the benefit of a good edit. Even if the silly story and the trite characters couldn't be saved, why leave these pages pocked with such lines? The answer, I can only assume, has something to do with the more than $5 million that a division of Random House reportedly paid to lure Gruen away from Algonquin, her small North Carolina publisher. That cynical process has misserved a beloved writer and her elephantine fan base. If there were any justice in publishing, Spiegel & Grau would be heckled by People for the Ethical Treatment of Authors. Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top GETTING TO HAPPY Terry McMillan Viking ISBN 978 0 670 02204 5 375 pages $27.95 Reviewed by Lisa Page, a visiting professor of creative writing at George Washington University In her break-out best-seller, "Waiting to Exhale" (1992), Terry McMillan celebrated female bonding. Girlfriends assumed top status in the hierarchy of important relationships for women. The novel, about four black women living in Phoenix in the late 1980s, depicted professional burn-out, romantic betrayal and survival. These were women in their late 30s and early 40s, providing solace to one another in a way that family members, husbands and boyfriends did not. They partied together, cried together and, ultimately, recovered together. McMillan's new novel, "Getting to Happy," is a sequel that resumes the story some 15 years later. All four women are back, but this time, of course, they're middle-aged. The issues of their youth have morphed into new ones. There are children now, from failed relationships, and grandchildren too, along with failed businesses and second mortgages. Each of the four is in her 50s, or about to be, and not quite sure what to do with herself. There's Savannah, a TV news producer. She's unhappily married to Isaac, a landscaper "in love with wood." Isaac is also in love with porn and spends more time on the computer than with his wife. And he's a Republican, which Savannah finds unacceptable. Robin is an insurance executive, a single mother and a compulsive shopper. The father of her daughter is in jail. She has a long history of sexual relationships with men that go nowhere, but she clings to one dream: getting married in a white dress. She recently discovered online dating. Bernadine is between jobs and the former owner of Sweet Tooth, a defunct restaurant. Her children are away at school, leaving her alone to mull over her failed romances. Her first husband left her for his receptionist, and No. 2 betrayed her, too. Bernadine has retreated into prescription drugs and spends most of her days anaesthetizing herself. Gloria is the only one happily married. She's a former hairdresser who manages her own salon. Her son is a policeman with three children and a wife of questionable moral stature. But Gloria is happy, at least in the early pages of the book. McMillan has said she didn't plan to write a sequel, but her old characters "began to reclaim their place in my heart, and, like old friends you haven't seen since college, I wondered how they might be faring now." She fleshes them out by shifting the point of view, sometimes writing in first person, sometimes in third, resulting in a crosshatch of perspectives. Her dialogue remains superb. These women have all kinds of contemporary challenges, including elderly mothers, deadbeat dads, hard-up sisters and a changing job market. They've gained weight, gone through menopause and suffered memory loss. They're lonely. They've stopped being social creatures. They used to "run their mouths on the phone half the night," but now they e-mail and text each other. "Apparently we're too damn old to have fun in public places," muses Savannah. But occasionally they get together for Blockbuster Night, where they watch bootleg DVDs and sip mojitos. Together, they voice their frustrations. "I find it grossly unfair that God rigged this whole thing so men seem to get better-looking as they get older and women simply age out. Why is it that their wrinkles make them sexy and more distinguished," asks Savannah, "while ours make us look old and unattractive?" They decide, individually and together, to upgrade their lives, to "get happy." The difference between this book and "Waiting to Exhale" is that "happy" has a different meaning now. For these women, it's no longer about the perfect job or the perfect man. It's a more complicated notion. The theme of addiction carries through the novel, and that's no accident. McMillan suggests that Bernadine's struggle with antidepressants, Robin's trips to the mall and Gloria's struggle with food are all symptoms of the same thing. The notion of "getting to happy" means doing away with self-delusion. And, according to McMillan, it also means forgiveness. The outrage and the disappointment so vividly portrayed in the opening chapters must ultimately melt into understanding, even love, if possible. Some readers may feel that "Getting to Happy" doesn't offer many surprises. The ladies learn to undo their vices, to visualize better lives and, through meditation, to breathe. And while this makes sense, in terms of the characters, it feels somewhat anticlimactic given the earlier chapters. Still, there's an integrity that isn't compromised here. McMillan clearly respects her characters and her readers, too. 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