On the Peculiar Art of Presidential Fiction

As Peter Morgan's Frost/Nixon opens on Broadway, I find myself free-associating, as is my habit... in this case, on the subject of presidential fiction.

Frank Langella, the actor who portrays Nixon in the play, has spoken in several interviews about the odd empathy he feels for our 37th president, who was by all accounts a psychological mess. The closest I've ever come to feeling empathy for Nixon was reading Robert Coover's The Public Burning. Starring Tricky Dick in his vice-presidential incarnation, this novel about the Rosenberg trial is one of the high-water marks of postmodern fiction. Hell, even JFranz likes it. (I'm joking, Mr. Franzen. Joking.) Aside from its idiom, the book's major achievement is its main character, who grows more ingratiating as he grows more loathsome. Potential libel suits stalled publication, according to the introduction by William H. Gass. We can only be grateful that they did not prevent it.

Nixon's belief in history as a pageant starring himself seems crucial to the development of a subgenre I've been calling, pace Matthew Sharpe, "historical fantasia." (See recent works by Mark Binelli, Chris Bachelder, and Lydia Millet, for examples). If The Public Burning is a foundational text, Philip Roth's Nixon novel Our Gang is a minor addition to the canon. Amusing stuff, and interesting as historical artifact, but inessential. Still, it further expanded the range of approaches the contemporary writer may take to historical figures.

Straddling the line between fiction and journalism, Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72 harnessed a Roth-like fury to a more revealing analysis of the mechanisms of power. On celluloid, Oliver Stone's Nixon (IMDb) attempted to get behind the mask, with mixed results. More recently, back in the world of letters, Gerald Reilly's O. Henry Award-winning story "Nixon Under the Bodhi Tree" was said to explore the life of...an actor getting ready to play Nixon. Which brings us full circle to Frost/Nixon.

And what of the other presidents? Gore Vidal had some success with Lincoln, David Foster Wallace notched an early triumph with "Lyndon," (in Girl with Curious Hair) and DeLillo achieved a then-career-best with his reconstruction of the Kennedy assassination (Libra). I even recall a lovely A.M. Homes story about The Gipper.

But the cast of characters in what is arguably the worst administration since Nixon's strikes me as devoid of literary interest. Practically the only enduring contribution of this crew to America's writers is its patented brand of cant. George Saunders has mastered the idiom. Hart Seely managed to turn Rumsfeld's arrogant evasions into a book of poems. I myself, if you'll forgive the plug, published a monologue called "The Love Song of Ari Fleischer" in 2004. But behind the words lurk people who have, for seven years, refused to grant room for ambiguity, complexity, and doubt - preconditions for the moral universe in which modern literature is possible. Instead, we get a stilted reduction whose protagonists, depending on who's reading, are either simply Good, or simply Wicked. We get Nicholson Baker's Checkpoint. We get "Stuff Happens" and "Guantanamo" - bracing theatrical experiences, but not dramas per se. A mark of the current administration's moral failure, and perhaps of its artistic triumph, is that it has sterilized many of the avenues for protest against itself. It brings out the worst in us, and has, by its relentless aestheticization of every aspect of American life, made the aesthetic feel insufficient. Perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps some artist or press secretary somewhere is even now working up a giant masterwork that illuminates W as a tragic hero caught on the horns of history. Somehow, though, I'm not convinced such a work would ring true. Anyway, I'm not holding my breath.

See Also: HST on the Campaign Trail, Kennedy's favorite fiction, Clinton's favorite books.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 9:38 PM ~ comments: 4 ~ Links to this post

 

Cottagers Week

My nominee for this season at the LBC, The Cottagers by Marshall N. Klimasewiski, is being discussed this week. I hope you'll join the discussion over there. My first post is on suspense and the contemporary novel.

- C. Max Magee @ 6:55 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Rock and Roll Breakfast

You can't swing your arms around in a general interest bookstore without hitting three or four "theme" cookbooks, which collect recipes related to a certain motif. This trend explains books like The Book Lover's Cookbook, Dinner Dates: A Cookbook for Couples Cooking Together, and The Sopranos Family Cookbook. These are books you buy as gifts for people you don't know that well.

But as with every rule there is an exception, which brings me to I Like Food, Food Tastes Good: In the Kitchen with Your Favorite Bands, which collects recipes culled from bands like Death Cab for Cutie, They Might Be Giants, and Belle & Sebastian. My old friends The Walkmen are in it too, which is fitting because they used to have recipe section on their web site. That's where I first learned about their "Foreign Chicken Dinner," the recipe they've contributed to the book. They don't have the recipe on their site any more, and I can't remember exactly what was in it, but I seem to recall it involved tomato sauce.

- C. Max Magee @ 8:21 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Halberstam's Heroes

Not having really read anything that David Halberstam wrote, I cannot write a good-faith eulogy of the man, nor engage in anything deeper than a surface discussion of his books. But because what I have read about Halberstam has painted him as a great journalistic voice of 20th century America, and because I have recently been barking about journalists and their books, it is appropriate to acknowledge Halberstam's unfortunate death Monday with some choice words.

Two aspects of Halberstam's written work resonate with me: his war correspondence and his interest in sports, specifically baseball. Halberstam wrote an acclaimed book about America's journey down the road to Vietnam, The Best and the Brightest. This road was built by a few American power brokers and followed by many American GIs, and though we did finally find the off-ramp, the road we are on today offers similar views of an ugly countryside for those who have not fallen asleep at the back of the bus.

On a more personal level, I have a vivid memory of being a young kid sitting at the foot of my parents' bed as my Dad read aloud from a book by David Halberstam called Summer of '49. A book about a different sort of journey, Summer of '49 chronicles the legendary pennant race that year between two little baseball teams: The Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees. The reader will learn that Joe DiMaggio had a brother, Dominick, who could play ball (though for the Sox), that Ted Williams hit like a hawk-eyed lumberjack, and that this particular race for first place was arguably the greatest in the vaunted History Of Baseball - and also represented a coming of age for the game in post-WWII America.

There is something to the notion of sports as a balm for citizens suffering from war fatigue. They are soldiers abroad gathered in a tent in the desert somewhere to watch the Super Bowl on television, and they are children bypassing front page headlines in favor of the sports section, and the box scores of games that they were forbidden to watch because of woefully premature bed times. Sporting events bring people together in celebration of achievement, rather than in protest of failure, and are thus both a distraction from the duty of citizens as witnesses to history, no matter how grim, and at the same time real and not insignificant demonstrations of the values of a free society, complete with overpriced cotton candy, and (today) overpriced athletes. Athletic competition, so often couched in terms of battle when described, transcends violence. It is an elevated and, I would argue, rather sophisticated form of human interaction.

David Halberstam will be recognized as a writer who occupied territory where these two cultural phenomena, sports and war - with seemingly endless parallel lines of history - could be said to intersect.

- Noah Deutsch @ 3:06 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Bandaids for Broken Book Sections

It's no secret that newspaper book sections are endangered. Earlier this month, the Atlanta Journal Constitution eliminated its book editor position, placing the fate of the paper's well regarded book section in question. Many are assuming the worst, that the newspaper will eliminate the section entirely. There's even a petition to protect the AJC book review.

With newspapers increasingly under fire from investors as once robust profit margins sag due to unprecedented competition from the Web and other forms of media and entertainment, many of these companies are looking to trim their operations in order to cut down on the costs of newsprint and personnel. Viewed in this light, book sections are dead weight.

The problem is that the book section business model is broken. As The Wall Street Journal reported (sub. req.) last month, publishers, the natural advertisers for book sections, don't spend much on ads because they find the ads to be too expensive or ineffective. This fact puts book sections at a big disadvantage as compared to other parts of the newspaper, all of which must pull their weight. Business sections, for example, do well because the financial profile of their readers inspires a willingness among advertisers to spend big bucks to reach them.

The broken business model of book sections has led a number of newspapers to take drastic steps. To this end, the LA Times recently unveiled a combined books/opinion section. The Chicago Tribune, the LA Times' sister paper, has taken a different tack, announcing that it will move its book section from Sunday to Saturday. The Tribune says that this move will "usher in a new era of the Tribune's coverage of books, expanding our coverage of books, ideas and the written word throughout the newspaper and across the week." In addition, "moving the section to Saturday will separate it from the Sunday newspaper, which already is bursting at the seams with essential reading, and make a prominent place for it on a new day of the week." This is all well and good - and certainly better than eliminating the book section altogether - but as the Chicago Reader noted over a year ago, when the book section switch was originally floated, "Saturday's press run is some 400,000 copies smaller than Sunday's. The annual savings in newsprint alone would reach half a million dollars." When the Tribune realized that stuffing an extra section into the Saturday paper would require them to pay their distributors more, they backed off, and converted the section to tabloid format, another newsprint saver. Seventeen months later, the paper appears to have realized that a switch to Saturday makes financial sense after all.

Ultimately, however, none of these measures will be satisfying to book section readers, and the fact is, except perhaps at the New York Times, there is little future for book sections showing up with our Sunday papers. The future of newspapers isn't in paper, and the same is doubly so for book sections.

I've been surprised that the many blogs that have decried the disappearance of book sections are the same ones that point out the obsolescence of newspapers - particularly their cultural coverage - in the face of a wealth of online alternatives. If our newspapers are going to be obsolete, our book sections will become obsolete as well. The tricky solution to all of this, of course, is the very medium that continues to beguile newspapers: online. There are still challenges here - as yet online ads don't pay nearly as well as print - but as book blogs have in some respects shown, there is a big audience for online book coverage, and online allows the discussion of books to break out of the "review" mold that may be contributing to the decline in the viability of newspaper book sections. The important thing to remember, I think, is that the disappearance of book sections isn't a book section problem, it's a newspaper industry problem, and the solution to book section woes will come with the solutions to the larger newspaper industry problems.

- C. Max Magee @ 9:28 PM ~ comments: 5 ~ Links to this post

 

Hard-Boiled on Ice: The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon

It should come as no surprise that Michael Chabon, with his latest novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union, has delivered a high concept work of genre fiction. That's par for the course for Chabon. More broadly speaking, Union's detective novel form will be familiar, but Chabon has made it his own by superimposing the story on a rewritten history, one in which the world's Jewish population was offered a temporary homeland in Alaska following World War II. The conceit is taken from a plan that was actually floated in the late 1930s but never actually went anywhere.

But though Chabon has crafted an entire alternate universe to explore, one that seemed to me would be rich with narrative possibilities when I first heard about the book, he uses it instead as little more than backdrop for a detective story of fairly straightforward construction. Not unlike bustling Bangkok provides the colorful backdrop for John Burdett's mystery novels, not unlike Michael Connelly's L.A. or George Pelecanos' D.C. As with many detective novels, both well-crafted and pulp, it is the setting that sets Union apart.

Though more ambitious conceptually than his previous work, Union isn't exactly new territory for Chabon. His Pulitzer winner The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay invents The Escapist, a superhero that captures the public consciousness during the 20th century alongside Superman and Batman. While that's not as impressive an imaginative feat as moving a whole people to the snowy hinterland, it frees Chabon to take his readers from Prague to New York City with a memorable interlude in Antarctica. Kavalier & Clay spans decades and incorporates the century's wars and social movements. In Union we are stuck in the crumbling neighborhoods of Sitka, where a dull grayness follows the action. Through fog, snow, and grime our hero Detective Meyer Landsman plods in his pursuit of a murderer.

In many ways Landsman is cut from a familiar "hard-boiled" mold. He is divorced, borderline alcoholic, and living in a fleabag hotel. Though ostensibly washed up, Landsman is preternaturally good at what he does, and Landsman's nearly superhuman powers of observation allow Chabon to unleash a flurry of descriptors and minutia upon every character we meet. "His herringbone trousers are stained with egg yolk, acid, tar, epoxy fixative, sealing wax, green paint, mastodon blood." "His skin is as pale as a page of commentary. His hat perches on his lap, a black cake on a black dish." Elsewhere, the prose is peppered with Yiddish, the preferred tongue of Jewish Alaska.

Landsman isn't all hard bitten though. He seems to swing between bravado and self-pity. After Landsman is made aware of a murder that his occurred in his hotel, the murder that is the crux of the book's plot, he must investigate a tunnel leading from the basement, and Chabon takes the opportunity to lay out Landsman's internal contradictions:

Landsman is a tough guy in his way, given to the taking of chances. He has been called hard-boiled and foolhardy, a momzer, a crazy son of a bitch. He has faced down shtarkers and psychopaths, been shot at, beaten, frozen, burned. He has pursued suspects between the flashing walls of urban firefights and deep into bear country. Heights, crowds, snakes, burning houses, dogs schooled to hate the smell of a policeman, he has shrugged them all off or he has functioned in spite of them. But when he finds himself in lightless or confined spaces, something in the animal core of Meyer Landsman convulses. No one but his ex-wife knows it, but Detective Meyer Landsman is afraid of the dark.

Landsman is, indeed, afraid of the dark, but the darkness is just another demon that haunts him, like the break up of his marriage to Inspector Bina Gelbfish (who has recently become Landsman's boss), and the death of his sister Naomi.

But whatever clinical diagnosis fits the brooding Landsman, this book is not a character study, it is a mystery novel. Initially, the dead man appears to be an anonymous junkie, but, as if to justify Chabon's alternate universe, the conspiracy that surrounds the death only grows until we see its global implications.

This all dovetails with the overarching predicament of the Alaskan Jews. Their settlement up north was never meant to be permanent, and now, in the present day, political machinations have led to the impending "Reversion" that will set them wandering once again.

It was this conceit that had me salivating for this book, but instead Union amounts to a 432-page detective story, colorful and filled with dazzling prose, but weighed down by a clunky plot that schleps along and attempts to live up to Chabon's grand premise.

- C. Max Magee @ 6:53 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Ask a Book Question: The 53rd in a Series (A Pair of Kings)

Mike writes in with this question:

I am a big Stephen King reader, and I am ready to read Desperation and The Regulators. I have heard these two books have the same characters with different storylines. Which was released first, and which is better to read first to enhance the overall stories? All I can find for release dates is that they both came out in 1996. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

The prolific Stephen King has been involved in a number of publishing experiments over the years and these two books were one of them. Desperation and The Regulators were released simultaneously in 1996, one under King's name and one under his pseudonym Richard Bachman. The books cover the same cast of characters, as Mike mentions, and they have been described as "mirror novels." Desperation takes place in a desolate Nevada town, while The Regulators is set in fictional small-town Ohio. In both books, the characters are faced with an evil spirit called Tak that can possess living things, including people. As to which one should be read first, I've seen nothing to suggest one over the other; however, when the books were initially released the covers, with art by Mark Ryden, were interlocking. The Regulators is on the left of the two, implying, to me anyway, that it should be read first.

- C. Max Magee @ 6:05 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Islands in the Stream: A Walking Tour of New York's Independent Booksellers

"Experience has fallen in value. And it looks as if it is continuing to fall into bottomlessness."

"It is no longer intelligence coming from afar, but the information which supplies a handle for what is nearest that gets the readiest hearing." -Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller." Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn.

When it comes to a reputation for difficulty, the book business is second only to the restaurant business... and no one has yet figured out how to run an online restaurant. The ascendance of e-commerce - along with the consolidation of corporate capital, the real estate bubble, and a host of concurrent factors - has over the last 15 years profoundly altered the reading lives of Americans. The changes are not exclusively for the worse; in the small town where I grew up, for example, it's become a hell of a lot easier for a high-school sophomore to get his hands on a volume of, say, Angela Carter. But, as the recent documentary "Indies Under Fire: The Battle for the American Bookstore" suggests, the mercantile landscape grows increasingly inhospitable for independent booksellers. A recent spate of high-profile bookstore closings underscores the point (via Ed).

Why does this matter? After a Joshua Ferris reading at an independent bookstore the other night, a friend of mine proposed that our cultural lives are forged by a confluence of information and experience. Information - that Rolling Stone gave the album Born to Run five stars, for example - is a perfectly reasonable way to get a handle on a work of art. But to experience "Born to Run" exploding off the Delaware Memorial Bridge at night, in the summer, with the windows down and a person you love in the passenger's seat, is to find it seared forever in one's soul, like Marcel's madeleine.

The corporate book-purveyor, armed with the best market research money can buy, directs information toward consumers. If I want to find out what Barnes & Noble thinks New Yorkers are likely to want to buy, the downstairs tables at the Union Square B & N can't be beat. And there are fine books on those tables. But as Walter Benjamin observes, "The acquisition of books is by no means a matter of money or expert knowledge alone." The experience of the Barnes & Noble - quality controlled, wood-veneered, perfectly odorless - disappears as soon as one is out the door.

A great bookstore, by contrast, is a staging ground for experience. The experience of the zealous clerk. The experience of the comely fellow browser. The experience of seeing Gordon Lish's first book of stories nestled against Eudora Welty's in a teetering pile, and reading the first page of "For Jerome" in situ, and feeling that private excitement of the mind. The experience of entering something larger than oneself... the republic of letters. As public libraries downsize stacks in favor of internet kiosks, this last experience, so important for so many of us, is increasingly the preserve of the independent bookstore.

Here in New York, the indie isn't dead - far from it. Passionate owners and managers and employees understand that they're not just making sales, but making room for an experience. As a way of thanking them, and celebrating the arrival (finally!) of spring - and in the spirit of Walter Benjamin - I herewith offer a highly selective walking tour of my favorite bookstores in New York.

"I have made my most memorable purchases on trips, as a transient. Property and possession belong to the tactical sphere. Collectors are people with a tactical instinct; their experience teaches them that when they capture a strange city, the smallest antique shop can be a fortress, the most remote stationery store a key position. How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!" -Walter Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library," trans. Harry Zohn.

• Stop 1: Gotham Book Mart (16 East 46th between 5th Avenue and Madison Avenue)

If my wanderings these days took me further uptown, I'd probably have some more stores to single out. As it is, I'll start with the Gotham Book Mart. This venerable institution, featured in a sexually charged scene in Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis, is also John Updike's favorite bookstore. This is, as far as I know, all that these two men have in common. In addition to fantastic selection of used & new 20th century literature, the Gotham boasts rare memorabilia, antiquarian treasures, and the best selection of literary magazines you'll find anywhere... period.

• Stop 2: The Strand (828 Broadway at East 12th.)

Having got your fill of midtown, amble down Broadway past 14th St. Now we're really in book country. The Strand, another New York institution, advertises "8 miles of books," but it feels more like 16. A recent redesign has stripped away some of the flyblown, foxed, and watermarked pleasures of shopping in The Strand, but the vertiginous sensation of being surrounded by millions of cheap books remains... a feeling like playing hooky with a slight fever. Be sure to troll the Parisian dollar stalls outside, as great finds abound. Half-price review copies are great if you're looking for contemporary fiction. The Strand remains a wonderfully terrible place to go searching for a specific book... I never leave empty-handed, but generally spend several hours and several dollars discovering volumes I wasn't planning to buy.

• Stop 3: St. Mark's Bookshop (31 3rd Avenue at 9th Street).

Continuing downtown, forgo the cramped Astor Place B & N in favor of St. Mark's Bookstore. You can't turn around in this fantastic shop without elbowing a brilliant intellectual... they're drawn here by the shelves full of recondite critical theory, post-New York School poetry collections, and cutting-edge art books... and by the feeling of rubbing elbows with the East Village denizens who penned them. Pick up some Slavoj Zizek, enjoy the condescension of an existentialist clerk... and be sure to wear your plastic-framed glasses. You'll emerge feeling 15 IQ points smarter.

• Stop 4: The folding tables on W. 4th St. (W. 4th between West Broadway and Mercer)

Okay, not strictly a bookstore, but what's better than lollygagging on a sidewalk on a sunny day and discovering W.G. Sebald? Prices are negotiable, and the guys who sell the books make even the most hardcore bibliophile look minor league.

• Stop 5: Oscar Wilde Books (15 Christopher Street between Greenwich Ave. & Waverly Pl.)

The country's oldest gay and lesbian bookstore has been serving the West Village for more than 40 years. For founder Craig Rodwell, a "gay and lesbian bookstore" was not a clearinghouse for erotica, but rather a bookstore whose shelves spoke to the lives of the gay community. The store has been central to advocacy efforts for gay rights and, in the 80s, recognition of the growing HIV/AIDS crisis. Many a young poet has worked the register here, and a recent program invited authors like Michael Cunningham to spend an afternoon clerking, offering patrons a unique chance to chat informally with their favorite writers. Or was that Three Lives I'm thinking of? (154 W. 10th at Waverly Place)

• Stop 6: Unoppressive, Non-Imperialist Books (34 Carmine St. between Bedford and Bleecker Streets)

This tiny shop on Carmine St. seems to run largely on remainders. Thus, prices are low, low, low. The sensibility is well-represented by the name. Here's the place to find Zen esoterica, punk rock poetry, and various books from the political left. And you don't have to worry about your money going to right-wing PACs. Much like...

• Stop 7: Housing Works Used Book Cafe (126 Crosby St. between Prince and Houston)

Having worked up an appetite, stop into this gorgeous loft space on atmospheric Crosby St., and buy soup or a knish or coffee... for a great cause. This bookstore, staffed by volunteers, stocked with donations, sends 100% of its proceeds to its parent organization, Housing Works, which provides medical care, job training, housing, and other services to New Yorkers with HIV/AIDS who have faced homelessness. It's truly an amazing project, and boasts some of the best literary programming in the city... like a recent reading/concert featuring Jonathan Lethem in conversation with George Saunders. Free! Of course, I'm biased, as Housing Works signs my paychecks.

• Stop 8: McNally Robinson (52 Prince St. between Mulberry and Lafayette)

McNally is maybe the most lavishly appointed bookstore in the city. Here, much attention has been paid to the aesthetics of the literary experience. Book displays feature small presses that produce beautiful books, like Coach House Books or Archipelago Books. The fiction section used to be arranged nationally (French, German, English, etc.), but is now, alas, alphabetical. Still, it's hard to leave McNally without something lovely. If you're not sure what to read, a friendly and knowledgeable staff is eager to share its favorite titles.

• Now, across the Brooklyn Bridge to Stop 9: BookCourt (163 Court St. between Pacific and Dean)

BookCourt is not only my neighborhood independent bookstore, it's the very model of a neighborhood bookstore. The selection of books and periodicals is large enough to meet everyone's interests, and well-curated enough not to be overwhelming. Displays are tailored to the neighborhood's reading habits... the BookCourt top 10 is always strikingly different from that of any bookstore in Manhattan. Benches on the sidewalk out front offer a comfortable place to crack open one's latest purchases.

• Stop 10: Freebird Books & Goods (123 Columbia St. between Kane & Degraw)

This ur-used bookstore is where I took in the above-mentioned Joshua Ferris reading, and so I'll defer to Mr. Ferris for a description:

"There's creaking hardwood floors, a pleasant dog on a thrift-store recliner, and the inimitable smell that comes of old comforting books long shelved back to back. It's my favorite used bookstore in New York because it gets everything right: the big plate-glass window, the bell on the door, the enviable view of Manhattan, and the always well-stocked fiction section. Plus, a palpable feeling that you're in a place where books, no matter how old, are alive and well. [...] Open Mic, special guests, and food and drinks, including Moxie soda (oldest in America) and corndogs. Freebird is the kind of place that reminds you of why you read, why you wander New York streets in search of something, and why you know it when you find it." (via TEV)

And now my feet are tired and it's time for a beer and a corndog. But if you want to keep exploring, you should check these out, too (commenters, please feel free to add to this list):

• Community Bookstore and Cafe of Park Slope (143 7th Avenue Brooklyn, between Carroll and Garfield Streets)
• Spoonbill & Sugartown (218 Bedford Avenue Brooklyn, between North 4th and North 5th Streets)
• Nkiru Books (68 St. Marks Place Brooklyn between 5th and 6th Avenues)

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 2:51 PM ~ comments: 8 ~ Links to this post

 

New Work from Kapuscinski

The Paris Review has published some work by Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, who died last year. The essay (not available online) covers more of Kapuscinski's travels through Africa, a familiar subject to those who have read his books. What's notable is that this issue also includes some of Kapuscinski's photography, which nicely augments his writing - though those who have read Kapuscinski's work know that he is more than able to conjure up images with his writing.

It's a good time for Kapuscinski fans because in addition to The Paris Review essay, a new book by Kapuscinski is on the way. I noted Travels with Herodetus at the end of my "most anticipated books of the year" post, but there were few details available at the time. Now we have a cover (as you can see), as well as the book's description, which tells us that Kapuscinski has written about his years as a young reporter.

From the master of literary reportage whose acclaimed books include Shah of Shahs, The Emperor, and The Shadow of the Sun, an intimate account of his first youthful forays beyond the Iron Curtain.

Just out of university in 1955, Kapuscinski told his editor that he'd like to go abroad. Dreaming no farther than Czechoslovakia, the young reporter found himself sent to India. Wide-eyed and captivated, he would discover in those days his life's work - to understand and describe the world in its remotest reaches, in all its multiplicity. From the rituals of sunrise at Persepolis to the incongruity of Louis Armstrong performing before a stone-faced crowd in Khartoum, Kapuscinski gives us the non-Western world as he first saw it, through still-virginal Western eyes.

The companion on his travels: a volume of Herodotus, a gift from his first boss. Whether in China, Poland, Iran, or the Congo, it was the "father of history" - and, as Kapuscinski would realize, of globalism - who helped the young correspondent to make sense of events, to find the story where it did not obviously exist. It is this great forerunner's spirit - both supremely worldly and innately Occidental - that would continue to whet Kapuscinski's ravenous appetite for discovering the broader world and that has made him our own indispensable companion on any leg of that perpetual journey.

Bonus Link: Google video has Kapuscinski's appearance in 2000 on The Charlie Rose Show. (You may need to turn the volume all the way up to hear it.)

- C. Max Magee @ 7:43 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Tuesday Links: More LBC, Bookride, Vonnegut

• My nominee for this round has been posted at the LBC blog. Though it didn't grab my cohorts enough to be named our "Read This" pick, I do highly recommend it.
• I recently happened upon bookride, a blog by a rare book dealer that each day posts about a valuable book, explaining why the book is collectible and why it's worth what it is. Fascinating stuff. A recent post looks at a rare copy of The Waste Land.
• Simon at Bloggasm rounded up a bunch tributes to Kurt Vonnegut including a slightly modified version of my post from last week.

- C. Max Magee @ 8:46 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

2007's Pulitzer Winners

The winners and finalists for the Pultizer Prize were announced today. I had recently speculated that The Road wasn't a "typical Pulitzer candidate" in that the Pulitzer typically recognizes books that are less post-apocalyptic, but The Road suddenly appears unstoppable. (Note as well that we now officially have a book that was picked by Oprah before it won the Pulitzer. I bet that surprises some people.) Here are this year's Pulitzer winners and finalists with excerpts where available:

Fiction:

• Winner: The Road by Cormac McCarthy
• After This by Alice McDermott - excerpt
• The Echo Maker by Richard Powers - excerpt

General Nonfiction:

• Winner: The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright - excerpt
• Crazy: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness by Pete Earley
• Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq by Thomas E. Ricks - excerpt

History:

• Winner: The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff - excerpt
• Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787-2005 by James T. Campbell
• Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War by Nathaniel Philbrick - excerpt

Biography:

• Winner: The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher by Debby Applegate - excerpt
• John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty by Arthur H. Cash - excerpt (pdf)
• Andrew Carnegie by David Nasaw

Winners and finalists in other categories are available at the Pulitzer Web site.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:57 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Don't Look Now, But...

The LBC has announced its latest pick.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:21 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Niche Bookstores: A Dying Breed

Earlier this week I happened upon a story in the Windy City Times about trouble at a Chicago bookstore called Women & Children First.

I had just finished a three-year stint at a terrific independent bookstore in Los Angeles when I first moved to Chicago in 2004, and I was inspired at the time to pen a post about what I was looking for in a bookstore in my adopted city: "one should be able to walk into the bookstore and be able to grasp, based upon which books are on display and based upon conversations with staff and fellow customers, what matters at that moment both in the wider world and in the neighborhood."

As it turns out, upon landing in Chicago the nearest bookstore, the only one in walking distance, was Women & Children First. Though the store's focus is pretty clear from its name, it was still a surprise to me when I discovered that the store almost exclusively carries books written by women. It could not then be the bookstore I was looking for, one that gave me a comprehensive view of what mattered "at that moment both in the wider world and in the neighborhood," though I did go there on many occasions. Still, it occurs to me that if an independent bookstore cannot satisfy me - pretty much the target consumer for indies - then it will have trouble in a world where few are interested in the unique experience independents have to offer.

At the same time, I find niche bookstores fascinating. There were a few in Los Angeles that I knew of, and in London, where bookstores are (or were - I was there several years ago) clustered together on side streets, one can hop from store to store as one might stroll from section to section in a shopping mall Borders.

But the lone niche bookstore seems a lot to me like a lone tree after the rest of the forest has been clear cut. They are even more vulnerable than indies with a general focus to the forces that are making it tough for indies to survive. If there had been two or three other bookstores nearby Women & Children First, each peddling books of a particular genre or focus, I would likely have patronized W&CF much more frequently.

Sadly, I don't expect we'll see many colonies of niche bookstores cropping up in our cities. I would guess the economics of the book industry don't support it. Still, there are many niche bookstores still around, quite of few of which are virtually unknown even to avid book people. They are worth seeking out as they are the unique and rare oddities within the literary ecology.

I'd love to hear about niche bookstores in the comments if anyone wants to tell us about some of their favorites.

- C. Max Magee @ 4:03 PM ~ comments: 4 ~ Links to this post

 

Cooking up a Bestseller

The hot memoir on shelves right now is that of former crack dealer and current big-time chef Jeff Henderson, whose book Cooked tells the story of how learning to cook in a prison kitchen changed his life. I heard Henderson on the radio a week or two ago and was definitely intrigued by his story which provides an inside look at dealing drugs, prison, and the kitchens of top-tier restaurants. A recent post at the Freakonomics blog shares a couple of brief excerpts which only made me more curious about the book. There's also a pdf excerpt at Henderson's Web site, and an interview with Henderson at Gothamist.

- C. Max Magee @ 3:29 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Adonal Foyle: Baller, Reader

Adonal Foyle, the former basketball standout at Colgate who has had a long career with the Golden State Warriors, has an impressive Web site that includes his very own book club. The club's current pick, The Da Vinci Code isn't terribly inspired, but I'm nonetheless impressed that an NBA star is broadcasting his love of reading. Note as well Foyle's "Top 10 Books" which includes an ample mix of basketball books and political non-fiction with a leftward-leaning bent.

via the Freakonomics blog, where a commenter has noted another NBA player with a literary side, Washington's Etan Thomas who has published a book of poetry.

- C. Max Magee @ 3:12 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Vonnegut and Celine

Jerome Weeks has an interesting post up at his blog about the impact of Louis-Ferdinand Celine's novels Journey to the End of Night and Death on the Installment Plan on the work of Kurt Vonnegut.

Both novels were written 30 years before Slaughterhouse: Celine was seriously wounded in battle during World War I, while Vonnegut, of course, survived the firebombing of Dresden in World War II. But Celine's fractured narrative style, in particular, had an enormous influence on Slaughterhouse (and Catch-22, as well).

And in the Philly Inquirer, Carlin Romano tries to explain just why Vonnegut has been such an enduring novelist, "why Vonnegut's leaps of inventiveness satisfied so many, why his political stilettos estranged so few."

- C. Max Magee @ 2:57 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Operation Homecoming Hits PBS

Millions contributor Ben penned a post in February about a documentary called Operation Homecoming about the National Endowment of the Arts' (NEA) program of the same name which is designed to help soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan put their experiences into words. (One participant in the program was Brian Turner whose book of poetry Here, Bullet was reviewed here a few months back.)

As was noted in a comment on the original post, Operation Homecoming is also going to be covered as part of a PBS package called America at a Crossroads. That series is set to air beginning this weekend. The 11-part, six-night series covers "the war on terrorism, conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan' the experience of American troops serving abroad, the struggle for balance within the Muslim world, and global perspectives on America's role overseas." The Operation Homecoming installment airs Monday at 10pm (check your local listings, of course.)

- C. Max Magee @ 10:08 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Instant News: Bob Woodruff Back from the Brink

Last week we remembered the death of journalist Michael Kelly four years ago near Baghdad, and examined his 1992 book, Martyr's Day, chronicle of the first Gulf War.

On to Bob Woodruff, ABC newsman, who was critically wounded on January 29, 2006, while reporting in Iraq. Exposed atop a patrolling tank, the 44 year-old Woodruff was preparing to shoot the day's segment on the security handover supposedly taking place between U.S. and Iraqi forces. Twenty-seven days prior, Woodruff had taken over as co-anchor of ABC Nightly News, successor to the late Peter Jennings. It was not to last: a roadside bomb exploded, and Woodruff suffered multiple shrapnel wounds and a massive traumatic brain injury.

Two declarations, the second more of an admission: first, I had by January of '06 come to recognize Bob Woodruff, watching ABC Nightly News on a semi-regular basis, and I liked his reporting. Like many, I was saddened by the news of his injury and cheered by the news of his recovery. Second, when I took my first cursory looks at the book about the ordeal that he wrote with his wife, Lee Woodruff, In an Instant: A Family's Journey of Love and Healing, I was nonplussed. For whatever reason, I didn't trust it.

A third declaration: the fact that Bob Woodruff is alive, let alone writing books, is miraculous. His personal courage and strength, along with that of Lee Woodruff and their family, and the dedication of the medical professionals who saved his life and then rebuilt him, shall not herein be diminished. But we are here to talk books, and so return to the difficulties of how to approach In an Instant.

The book's release early this year attended Woodruff's tentative return to the ABC newsroom. Woodruff appeared on TV talk shows and other media outlets as well. Here was a man who had been forced to regain, through therapy, the ability to speak - no small thing for anyone, let alone a network news anchor. In an Instant is his story.

But there was twinge of something darker hiding in the inspirational folds of the Woodruff family saga. The book seemed to validate the notion that, in this day and age, if you live to tell the tale (and sell the tale - In an Instant has been near the top of national non-fiction bestseller lists since its release), no matter how personal it is, you will do so - and right quick. It also made me think of the American men and women who have not returned from Iraq alive. Of those that have lived through injuries, many do not have what the Woodruffs are lucky enough to have, a loving, wide-ranging community of family and friends. Others have not received what Bob Woodruff received, the finest medical care money can buy.

Despite these implications, the book, and its two writers, did ultimately win my trust, if not my unbounded critical admiration. As inspiration, In an Instant has infinitely greater value than your standard issue Dr. Doctor self-help schlock. It is told in the alternating voices of Lee and Bob, mostly Lee, as Bob was in a sedated state for five weeks before fully regaining consciousness. The writing is straightforward, and there is quite a lot of information packed into the pages. The Woodruffs recount concurrently both the story of recovery that followed that fateful Instant, and the story of their lives together from the instant they first met, their marriage, the birth of their four children, and Bob's rise through the ranks of TV journalism. Woodruff bounced around a lot as a young newsman, from China in June of 1989, where he got his first taste of reporting, to San Francisco, Richmond, Phoenix, Chicago, D.C., and then London, where he was a lead foreign correspondent for ABC on 9/11/01 (Bob and Lee's 13th wedding anniversary.)

These movements mirror the rapid movements and decisive actions that immediately followed his injury. From the road outside the town of Taji, Woodruff was taken to a military hospital in the Baghdad green zone, then airlifted to a U.S. army combat field hospital in Balad that took the most severe casualties. These unnamed military doctors saved Bob Woodruff. Without hesitating, they sawed through his cranium to relieve the pressure on his brain. Woodruff was then flown by Critical Combat Air Transport to Landstuhl Germany, where an army surgeon, Dr. Guillermo Tellez, removed the shattered left half of his skull. From Landstuhl, Woodruff was flown again by CCATT plane to Andrews Air Force Base and rushed to Bethesda Naval Hospital outside D.C., where he would lie in an induced coma for over a month. The military's impressive advances in combat triage are on full display here.

Forced to perform her own family triage, Lee Woodruff describes in detail the shock of the news, and her own rapid, unflagging response. Lee's ability to handle the immense weight of her family's crisis, to inform but reassure her four children, and keep herself going as she attended her quiescent and disfigured husband, these efforts are just as heroic as Bob's inner fight to survive. And there's a fine payoff. Walking into his room at Bethesda Naval on the morning of March 6, expecting to find her husband unchanged, she instead found him awake: "'Hey Sweetie,' Bob said lovingly, with a little note of surprise. 'Where've you been?'"

For me, the most interesting aspects of the book are the details of Woodruff's recovery, highlighted by some telling photographs. The image of this man, recognizable to so many people as a vigorous and handsome face on their TV, here smiling bravely into the camera with his two eldest kids, Cathryn and Mack, on either side, his face scarred, his head dented, says it all. Late in May, now in the care of neurosurgeons from Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan, Woodruff underwent another risky procedure, a cranioplasty surgery, in which the doctors bonded an artificial skull-piece to his existing bone. His head outwardly rebuilt, Bob Woodruff then focused on the task of rebuilding what was inside. Like so many others with traumatic brain injury, he had to relearn his life, especially his speech. This process is fascinating, and the rapid progress that Woodruff made, astounding.

Political opinions and philosophical conclusions are not for the TV reporter, whose job it is to present the story, an impartial witness to events. It is understandable, then, that In an Instant is a book about a family and not a war. The Woodruffs do address some of the thornier issues that lie buried in their story, if only very briefly. Bob discusses what it means to be a war correspondent putting himself in harm's way, though his conclusions are that covering war is, for him, "a strange addiction," and that war itself is "an affliction of the human race." These are sterilized, apolitical, and not-so-penetrating insights.

And what about the wife of the addicted war journalist? While Lee Woodruff does discuss the strain that her husband's profession placed on their marriage before Bob was injured, she rarely reveals any crack in her facade of nurturing support and union during Bob's recovery, other than understandable and unsurprising anxiety, depression, and fear. She frets about what might befall the family if Bob were to die or be unable to work again, and about the long-term effects that the traumatic event might have on her children, but acrimony has no place in this tale. Even in remembering the death of David Bloom, Bob's friend and colleague who died outside Baghdad of a pulmonary embolism in April '03 while covering the war for NBC, there is surprisingly little soul searching by the authors about the potential effect this strange addiction, embedded war reporting, can have on a family. Does Bob Woodruff have regrets? The answer will not be found in In an Instant.

In an Instant carries a relentlessly positive message of triumph over adversity, and hope in the face of tragedy. Appropriately, the Woodruffs do acknowledge how lucky they are to have had the resources, both human and monetary, of a large corporation to see them through. There are many people to thank, and they thank each and every one. They have done something else, too, which is to establish a charitable trust to benefit the 1.4 million Americans a year affected by TBI, Traumatic Brain Injury. And they note that many such men and women, in the care of the U.S. military medical system, "are not receiving appropriate cognitive rehabilitation, for whatever reason."

So there you have it, and time marches on. I myself hope to see Bob Woodruff back on the air with regularity, and would consider it yet another amazing addendum to the story if he were to return to the anchor chair at ABC News. I would also understand it if he walked away from the news altogether, though it would surprise me. No matter what the future holds for Bob Woodruff, his life was nearly taken in an instant, in a war he was risking his life to cover. His is, as Tom Brokaw writes, "a book for our time."

- Noah Deutsch @ 7:45 AM ~ comments: 3 ~ Links to this post

 

Kurt Vonnegut RIP

Awoke to the news that Kurt Vonnegut died. His death was somewhat unexpected, coming after a fall at his home in New York, but he lived a full life, even penning a surprise bestseller that put him back in the public eye in 2005. That was fun to see because, though Vonnegut may be one of the most important writers out there for me as a reader, most of his literary output came before I was born.

When I was a younger reader, I was a completist. I didn't have knowledge of dozens of books and writers at my fingertips, so when I found a book I really liked, I would read everything by that author. And so it was that I read substantially everything that Vonnegut had written before I left home for college, starting with a late novel, Hocus Pocus, after finding it lying around the house when I was 14 or 15, and finishing up with Player Piano, Vonnegut's first novel, on a long, late-summer car ride home from Maine, a few weeks before moving away from home. So, in many ways, Vonnegut was in the background through my teenage years, providing a vivid counterpoint to the mundanities of suburban high school life. His books are very important to who I am as a reader and a writer, so I'm sad to see him go.

Some links: My call for more people to read the lesser-known Vonnegut novels. The New York Times obit.

Update: Some of you may be seeing a lot of folks writing "so it goes" today in response to Vonnegut's death. For those who are curious as to why, the phrase comes from what is perhaps his most famous book, Slaughterhouse-Five, where he wrote: "When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is 'So it goes.'"

Also, I found Vonnegut's official site to be particularly poignant today.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:06 AM ~ comments: 5 ~ Links to this post

 

Killer of Sheep, Finally.

You may have missed it in the New Yorker a few weeks back (if it weren't for my wife, I would've), but tucked away in the Critic's Notebook section of the magazine was the best piece of cinematic news I've heard all year. Killer of Sheep, Charles Burnett's 1977 film about life in the Watts section of Los Angeles, has finally gotten a theatrical release. Because of issues clearing the rights of the music in the film (the single biggest pain in any independent filmmaker's neck), it's been locked away in a vault in the Library of Congress, shown only once every few years at a film festival or museum. I was lucky enough to catch a rare screening when I was in college, and it was unforgettable.

The story, in so far as there is one, is simple. Stan, an employee of a South Central slaughterhouse (hence the title of the film), is depressed and retreating from his wife. Interspersed with scenes of Stan at home and at work (the footage of the sheep is both fascinating in its gore and haunting, like watching a lake before a storm) are snippets of kids playing, women gossiping, and men scheming to make a few dollars more. What makes Killer of Sheep so memorable is the depth and reality of the characters and the incredibly complex humor the film employs. Indeed, for a movie that says so much about poverty, it's surprisingly funny. And the new print - beautifully restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive - is a luscious 35mm blow-up of the original 16mm negative. I saw the film again last night, and it looked crisp and clean.

In certain film-buff circles, Killer of Sheep has long been a trump card, an instant badge of street cred that could top anything. Oh, you saw a five hour performance of Gances' Napoleon with the London Philharmonic? Well, I saw Killer of Sheep a few weeks ago at Doc Films. Since it's never even been released on video, it has become legendary, a sort of a cinematic equivalent to J.D. Salinger's "Hapworth 16, 1920." But to leave it at this is to cheapen a tremendous film, and to discount the effect it's had on cinema since. David Gordon Green, Spike Lee, and the people who make "The Wire" all owe a debt to Mr. Burnett. As much as I loved being the only person in on the joke, I'd love even more if everybody went out and saw this film. Luckily, it might be coming to a theater near you.

- Patrick Brown @ 6:25 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Two Tastes That Taste Great Together

Every so often in a reader's life, he stumbles upon two books that complement each other like red meat and red wine. Such a happy accident befell me last month, when I happened to read Michael Lewis' Liar's Poker hard on the heels of Thomas Frank's One Market Under God.

The Frank book, an evisceration of the free-market discourse and management culture of the 90s, was a fine read on its own: funny, incisive, and angry. And yet, in its argumentation, it at first struck me as inferior to Frank's more recent What's the Matter With Kansas? Like Lewis Lapham, who published excerpts from both books in Harper's, Frank has a tendency to preach to the choir. This often doesn't bother me; I sit right in the middle of that choir. When Frank demonstrates the tension between a free market and economic democracy, I say "Amen." When he decries the commodification of the counterculture, I shout "Hallelujah."

When Frank gets down to naming names, however, I get uneasy. One Market Under God does not hesitate to lay the sorry state of the world at the feet of specific, individual evildoers, and I, raised to try to see the best in people, prefer to blame systemic ills. And so I'm not sure if Frank's depiction of scheming, iniquitous fat cats is a workable belief or a bit of populist wishful thinking.

Or I wasn't sure, until I picked up Liar's Poker. Here Michael Lewis, himself a former stockbroker, takes us inside Salomon Brothers, the investment bank where he worked in the rip-roaring 80s. Lewis establishes his centrist credentials early and often, and generally eschews editorializing. It is especially appalling, then, (if weirdly engrossing) to discover that Salomon Brothers is full of...scheming, iniquitous fat cats!

Liar's Poker is like a nonfiction version of Oliver Stone's Wall Street (IMDb). The visionary salesmen and traders of Solomon Brothers screw the little guy at every turn, and we get to see every dirty detail. They rip off investors, lie to the public, devalue successful companies, inflate worthless ones, lay off employees, throw phones at underlings, grope secretaries, consume conspicuously, and generally turn themselves into caricatures of the worst kind of capitalist exploitation. The free-market they promote is, in fact, far from free.

In an ideal marketplace, knowledge is symmetrical. The vulgar version: buyer and seller are in possession of the same set of facts, and prices reach equilibrium according to the law of supply and demand. This is why there are laws against rolling back odometers, and against making false claims in advertisements. But investment banks, as Lewis portrays them, rely on the market's inefficiency at distributing information - its tendency to allow those most heavily invested in a market to control the flow of knowledge within and about that market - to buy below fair-market value, and to sell well above it.

Of course, we are assured, such excesses have since been curbed by regulation. (This is part of the 90s market populism analyzed in One Market Under God, wherein Wall Street is brought to heel by Main Street.) Insider trading laws are now stringent, we are told; firewalls have arisen between the trading floors where commodities are sold and the equity departments where they are underwritten. But Wall Street is still raking it in, while Main Street drifts and eddies on stagnant wages.

Perhaps the current investment bank bonanza is merely the financial industry's reward for its own newfound virtuousness. Still, the next time you hear an I-banker lamenting the regulatory climate, or claiming that Sarbanes-Oxley is driving all the moneymen to London, ask him what kind of bonus he got last year, and whether he's still living in New York. Then tell him you've got a bridge you're looking to sell...

See also: Max's review of Liar's Poker

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 6:06 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

To Live and Die (and Read About It ) in LA

I have a Bloglines account. Since you're reading this blog, you probably know what I'm talking about, but in case you don't, I'll explain. Bloglines takes all the blogs and websites you read everyday and bundles them together in one place, so you can check them without getting repetitive stress disorder from your web browser. Bloglines is like the newspaper of stuff I care about. There is no real estate section in my paper, no classifieds, only sports, food, the occasional political rant, and then an extensive cultural section that includes the blog you're reading now, and more than a few others that cover film, music and celebrity gossip (the lifeblood of the modern news media).

For the last couple of months, my "newspaper" has included a metro section, and that section has been dominated by the Homicide Report, written by Los Angeles Times crime reporter Jill Leovy. The Homicide Report is a straightforward, factual account of every homicide in Los Angeles County. It runs five days a week. Most of the homicides only a get a line or two, a simple description of the facts, under a stark and pointed headline ("Man shot working on a car"; "Teacher Found Killed"), but more importantly, whenever possible, the identity of the victim is revealed. For most homicides, this is a few lines more recognition than they would get in the Los Angeles Times or in any newspaper, for that matter. As Leovy says, "The media often covers homicide as a statistic story, marking up-and-down jags in the rates." In an interview with the blog LA Observed (another of my daily reads) she explains some of her motivation for starting the blog:

"At the very least, seeing all the homicides arrayed in a list like this will give readers a much more real view of who is dying, and how often. And for me, it means no longer having to confront weeping mothers who say their sons' deaths were never covered by the press."

It seems fitting that LA would lead the way with a blog about murder (Note: other cities have followed suit; just this week the Houston Chronicle launched its own homicide blog (via bloghouston.net)). After all, this is the city of James Ellroy and Raymond Chandler, of Michael Connelly and Joseph Wambaugh, of Quentin Tarantino and Michael Mann. Crime is woven into the fabric of the city and its culture in a way that doesn't seem to be the case in the other American cities (except maybe Baltimore). While the classic noirists and the masters of the procedural used crime in the city to tell stories of the evil that lurked within it, the Homicide Report seems determined to tell of the innocence, as well. It remains to be seen what effect the blog will have on crime rates, if any, but it already raises my awareness on a daily basis.

- Patrick Brown @ 6:35 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Helping Odysseus Find His Way Home

No wonder Odysseus had so much trouble finding his way home. It turns out that there is some dispute as to the actual historical location of Ithaca, where Penelope waited for her hero husband to return. As noted in a recent article in The Economist, in The Odyssey, "Homer's Ithaca 'lies low,' but its modern namesake is hilly. And though Odysseus's island is 'farthest to sea towards dusk,' today's Ithaca is close to the mainland in the east." This disparity hasn't gone unnoticed by historians and geographers over the years, but now, for the first time, investigations may provide clues as to the true location of Homer's Ithaca, as geologists using a subterranean scan determine if Kefalonia, to the west of present-day Ithaca, was once actually two islands, the westernmost of which would fit Homer's description. Locals are taking sides as Odysseus' home brings with it a lucrative tourist trade.

- C. Max Magee @ 9:03 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

A Fortune

We went out for Chinese with some friends last night, and this is the fortune that came in Mrs. Millions' fortune cookie. Auspicious, no?

- C. Max Magee @ 9:37 AM ~ comments: 3 ~ Links to this post

 

Culture Under Siege: A Diary of Iraq's National Library

For the last several months, the web site of the British Library has been hosting the online diary of Saad Eskander, Director of the Iraq National Library and Archive (INLA). As many readers are likely aware, the Library was looted in the early days of the American invasion, and Eskander has spent much of his time since trying to rebuild his collections under perilous conditions.

Reading through the diary it quickly becomes apparent that Eskander and his team are faced with far greater challenges than simply picking up the pieces of the wrecked library. Instead they face daily threats to their lives, and the laundry list of wound and killed friends and colleagues and many more near misses makes one wonder how the library staff can go on living in Baghdad. At the end of 2006, Eskander compiles a list (scroll down) of violent acts committed against INLA staff and their families and determines that 70 have been killed since the conflict began. The number has ticked higher in subsequent months.

Last month, Eskander posted an entry (scroll down) about the day that al-Mutanabi Street, the home of Baghdad's outdoor book market and just a short distance away from the INLA, was bombed. "This day will be always remembered, as the day when books were assassinated by the forces of darkness, hatred and fanaticism," he says. "Tens of thousands of papers were flying high, as if the sky was raining books, tears and blood."

As a whole, the diary is an incredible chronicle of lives lived under siege and put in terrible danger to keep Iraq's cultural institutions from disappearing entirely.

via The Eclectic Chapbook, which also remarks on a BBC program about Eskander and the INLA.

- C. Max Magee @ 11:51 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Tina Brown's New Yorker Lives On

An uncharacteristically thorough post at Gawker goes in depth on the make up of the current staff of the New Yorker, pointing out that the resurgent magazine under editor David Remnick is staffed by a disproportionate number of writers brought on during the tenure of reviled editor Tina Brown. Interesting stuff.

- C. Max Magee @ 11:30 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

IMPAC shortlist 2007

The IMPAC shortlist has arrived. If you don't know about the IMPAC, it's a very unique prize with a very long longlist. This year's longlist was composed of nominees from 169 libraries in 45 countries around the world. Those picks are then whittled down to a shortlist via a panel of judges. As you'll see from the shortlist, since the process leading up to this award takes so long, some of the books aren't exactly new. I think involving libraries makes the IMPAC unique compared to a lot of other awards out there. It seems a lot more egalitarian than, say, the Booker or the National Book Award, and I appreciate the international flavor as well. There's more info about the award at the IMPAC site. Now, here's the shortlist with some comments:

• Arthur and George by Julian Barnes - Was shortlisted for the Booker back in 2005 - excerpt
• A Long Long Way by Sebastian Barry - Joined Barnes on the 2005 Booker shortlist.
• Slow Man by J.M. Coetzee - This book was featured in our long ago post "The beauty of British book design."
• Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer - Corey took a look at this book in a "CVBoMC" installment last year. - excerpt.
• The Short Day Dying by Peter Hobbs - This debut effort by British novelist Hobbes was nominated by a single library in Bergen, Norway
• No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy - With The Road getting all the praise these days, some might forget that McCarthy's previous novel hit shelves just 21 months ago, a blink of an eye for a writer who's written ten books in 41 years - excerpt
• Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson - This book by the Norwegian Petterson won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize last year. It'll be published in the U.S. next month.
• Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie - Shalimar was a Whitbread finalist in 2005, but generally the book is not thought to be one of Rushdie's best efforts. The book was nominated by a library in Berlin - excerpt

- C. Max Magee @ 10:35 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

The Millions Interviewed

Wanting to know a bit more about me and the site? I've been interviewed at the literary community site LitMinds. In this interview you can find out the answers to such burning questions as why I started the blog and how it got its name. And for the truly obsessed Millions fans, they've even managed to score a picture of me to adorn the interview.

- C. Max Magee @ 10:29 PM ~ comments: 3 ~ Links to this post

 

The Road To Baghdad: Remembering Michael Kelly

1.
Four years ago today, Michael Kelly became the first journalist to lose his life in Iraq while covering The U.S.A.'s most recent war there. He was young, 46, and remarkably accomplished, having recently been named editor of a reinvigorated Atlantic Monthly. This after he had made a name for himself writing for some of the big boys, the Sun and the Globe, the Times and the Post, the New Yorker, and then editor of the New Republic at an age when many men these days are googling the term 'quarter-life crisis' on their under-used laptops. He was a rare individual, and he left behind a wife and two sons, aged 3 and 6, when he died.

Twelve years before he left home for the last time, Michael Kelly, who was raised on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. (his parents and mine remain close friends and neighbors), wrote the definitive account of the Gulf War, the first Iraq War, also known as Operation Desert Storm. It was a war that went by many names, America's 1991 military foray into the Persian Gulf. But the book goes by just one: Martyr's Day: Chronicle of a Small War (Random House, 1992). It is based on the revealing, carefully crafted pieces that Kelly, stringing to the Boston Globe, GQ, and the New Republic while bouncing around the Middle East on his borrowed freelancer's scratch, sent over the wire. Often mentioned in the same breath as Michael Herr's searing account of the Vietnam War, Dispatches, Martyr's Day stands among the very best in a decorated tradition of American war correspondence.

On April 3, 2003, Michael was no doubt pulsating with his writer's instincts and observations, which surely would have become the follow up to Martyr's Day. Embedded with the Third Infantry Division, U.S. Army, and headed down the road to Baghdad International Airport in a Humvee driven by an army staff sergeant, Michael was, as usual, in the right place at the right time. The city of Baghdad at that moment was being liberated from Baath party control by the Marines. Here, on this very roadway perhaps, was an opportunity for Michael, twelve years removed from covering his first Iraq War, to reflect on the fact that this was the one event that neither he, nor anyone, had witnessed back in 1991: the fall of Saddam's Baghdad. They took mortar fire, the Humvee went off the road, landing upside down in a ditch, and both Michael and the staff sergeant were killed.

2.
In 1991, Iraq was a nation led by a belligerent, authoritarian dictator, Saddam Hussein, who had ordered Iraq's tanks and battalions into the oil-wealthy and blithely vulnerable neighbor state of Kuwait. The ensuing military conflict pitted a coalition of many nations, with the U.S. in command, against the Iraq army. It was soon apparent to the reporters at the "front" that the Iraq army was composed of men who felt about as much motivation to fight in defense of their tyrannical leader's capriciousness as you might expect from right thinking, sane individuals - none at all. The rout was on.

Maybe the most indelible passage in Martyr's Day is Kelly's description of an encounter he had with a ragged band of Iraqi soldiers on the road to Kuwait City. He and another reporter were eager to chronicle the post-liberation conditions in the invaded capitol and were driving their rented pickup truck hard to get there. Their nervousness at seeing Iraqi soldiers on the road gave way to astonishment when the soldiers, unarmed, under-clothed, and numbering around ten, eagerly surrendered to them, two American journalists.

Now, said the lieutenant, he and his men were very cold and hungry and they would appreciate it if we would take them prisoner. I am five feet six inches tall and bespectacled and running slightly to poundage. Dan [Fesperman, Baltimore Sun reporter] is taller and doesn't wear glasses, but he is not an overwhelming figure either. I don't think either of us felt that we were the sort of men that take other men prisoner.

Instead, they gave the men food and water, and piled them into, and onto, the pickup, driving a ways down the road, where they ran into a Saudi army unit, out doing its part for the coalition, though there was nothing much to do.

It is at this point in the narrative, when the reader's laughter at the perfect absurdity of the scene is beginning to subside, that Kelly brings it back to reality, to war, or the sobering specter of it. The Saudis, a bit starved themselves - for combat action - rounded up the Iraqis, now proper prisoners, and began hectoring them, and taking aim with their automatic rifles as though they meant to execute the men then and there.

They screamed and shouted and made as if, any moment, they were going to shoot. The Iraqis, stunned and terrified, sat down in the dirt, their hands on their heads still, and their faces to the wind, in a ragged little line. One man clutched his Koran to his chest for protection and rocked, moaning, back and forth on his haunches. Another cried for Allah, and wept, and clutched at his crotch and hair in little paroxysms of terror. I watched them weeping and begging for their lives, and I had to turn aside so they wouldn't see me crying too.

Reading this passage reminded me of the battered canteen, olive green, and with liquid of dubious nature still sealed inside, that Michael gave to me upon his return. It belonged to an Iraqi soldier, he had said. I was fourteen years old. The soldier was probably dead.

3.
As the subtitle of Kelly's book suggests, the Gulf War was a "small" war. It was a nasty, pathetic affair. It was not World War II, so well chronicled in multiple theaters of battle by Ernie Pyle, whose collection of dispatches, Ernie Pyle's War, remains a benchmark classic of war correspondence journalism. Pyle was killed by a Japanese sniper on a Pacific Island, his war so close to its end.

What Kelly witnessed in 1991 was a far cry from Ernie's War. And as a consequence, his book was necessarily more than blood-and-guts war journalism. This is not to say that the Gulf War was not a horrible, traumatizing, and often deadly experience for many people. Kelly describes many scenes of suffering. The squalid Kurdish refugee camps come to mind. But there is a bemused puzzlement, indeed, at times an absurdity to many of the proceedings. Kelly's description of wartime Tel Aviv, under constant threat of a Saddam Scud missile attack, is memorable. What emerges is a vision of a modern day London during the Blitz - with kibbutz, and bits of rhinestone fashioned by the ladies to their government-issue gas mask kits to match their eveningwear. The Scud raids were infrequent and ineffective, and on the whole you'd have to say that 1991 Tel Aviv, with its discotheques, its beaches, its conscripted, no-nonsense army, and its irrepressible pro-American fervor, was a safer place than London in '40 and '41.

Kelly's engaging, funny, conversational writing, his man-on-the-street (of Baghdad, of Amman, Tel Aviv, Cairo, Dhahran, Kuwait City) perspective, assisted by his broad but honest impressions of some of the maddeningly complex political relationships among Middle Eastern states, regions, and peoples (of which there are a few), these qualities add much to Martyr's Day. In addition to being a book about war, Martyr's Day is history (the opening discussion of the history of Iraq from ancient empire to modern dictatorship comes to mind), and it is also armchair cultural anthropology: "I knew by now that in Arabia [Egypt in this case] office life was patterned after an older rhythm. An official in his government room received visitors in much the same fashion as his grandfather had in his courtyard - casually, endlessly, and with a good deal of overlapping, since no one was ever in any particular hurry. The love of talk and the love of manners dictated against hurrying into any matter at hand." The book can sometimes sound like a very amusing travel guide to the Middle East, such as when Kelly describes the grand farce that is traveling into and out of Israel, for which he needed to carry two passports, one of which would never show a mark of having been to Judea, in order to appease the firm policy of non-recognition adhered to by Israel's neighboring Palestinian nation states.

There is one final important tonal element to Martyr's Day, and it emerges early on, as Kelly describes the culture of Baghdad, where he spent a good deal of time in the days leading up to January 17, 1991, when American bombs began to fall on the city. This final element is a mixture of pride and disgust. The disgust is evident in his appraisal of the Saddam Hussein regime, its moral bankruptcy, its physical and ideological feebleness, and the mostly closeted dissatisfaction of an Iraqi populace that had been too long under the thumb of a tyrant, but had not the first clue of how to live in any other way. The pride is that of a pa