It's that busy, dizzy holiday season again. Just think books.
Non-fiction first:
Here's a good biography that is certainly
topical: The Bishop's Boys, by Tom Crouch. The Boys are Wilbur and
Orville Wright, the Bishop, their father Milton, and Tom Crouch is chairman
of the department of aeronautics at the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum.
On December 17, the entire world will celebrate the centennial of the Wright
brothers' famous flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Their plane hangs
now at the Smithsonian, lowered to eye level in recent weeks. Its label
reads, in part: THE WRIGHT BROTHERS TAUGHT MAN TO FLY. The ultimate adventure,
and yet Wilbur (1871-1948) and Orville (1867-1912) do not seem adventurers.
Shy and formal in manner, always (even at Kitty Hawk) in shirts and ties
(Wilbur usually wore high-buttoned shoes), both were lifelong bachelors.
Their immediate family life, with their father, a bishop only when his
Church of the United Brethren elected him to a term, and their devoted
younger sister, Katherine, were warm and supportive, even though their
mother died before fame arrived for her sons. This book will give you a
very readable introduction to these two American geniuses who led us all
into the air. (There is also a very recent Wright biography -- James Tobin's
To Conquer the Air -- getting good reviews.)
Adam Nicolson is a British writer and publisher who has won several awards. His latest book is God's Secretaries, subtitled The Making of the King James Bible. James became King of England in 1603 upon the death of Elizabeth I. He sought union and peace between Scotland and England and figured a new translation of the Bible, which would be read in all English pulpits, would be a unifying force. King James sought to bring the greatest biblical scholars in his kingdom together, some 50 notables in all. They were divided into six groups, each assigned to work on several books of the Bible. After that, a review committee would take over. Surely an impossible task -- everyone knows a committee never produces great literature. This time it miraculously happened and a simple vocabulary was set in a stately rhythm. (Not always -- Nicolson points out a few very muddled passages.) The scholar-translators all seemed to grasp that this was a book to be heard as much as to be read. T.S. Eliot in our time describes an "auditory imagination", a "feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought." The King James Bible has one equal in this auditory imagination, exactly contemporaneous, and that is Shakespeare. Both of these sources have influenced all of us, religious or not, who read and speak English.
A biography which is a fine historical review of our nation's founding is Benjamin Franklin, subtitled An American Life. Walter Isaacson, former managing editor of Time and chairman of CNN, is the author. If you read Edmund Morgan's equally good (but much shorter) Franklin last year, you will find this new biography complements it. Morgan wrote more of a character analysis, Isaacson a more typical year-by-year chronology. (17061790). We see BF gaining renown as a writer, a scientist, a political figure. Only Franklin worked on all 4 of the vital founding documents of our nation: the Declaration (Jefferson gave it to him to edit), the treaty of alliance with France, the peace treaty with England, and the Constitution. If you use bifocals when you read this book and electric lights, thank Franklin. Journalist David Brooks has called BF our Founding Yuppie. He usually called himself B. Franklin, printer. This book is printed in a font modeled on one which Franklin created. Nice touch.
Fiction next:
The Miracle life of Edgar Mint
is a first novel by Brady Udall, who grew up in Indian country in N.E.
Arizona. He teaches now at Southern Illinois University. Here are the first
words of his book:
"If I could tell you only one thing about my life it would be this: when I was 7 years old the mailman ran over my head. As formative events go nothing else comes close to that summery morning when the left rear tire of a U.S. postal jeep ground my tiny head into the hot gravel of the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation."
Now there's a reader-grabber. Edgar tells us of his life in the reservation hospital, then at an Indian boarding school, and with a Mormon foster family. Finally he finds the home of the mailman who thought he had killed Edgar. His account of all this is occasionally heartbreaking and often uproariously funny.
Chicago has a treasure perhaps not fully appreciated - that would be Joseph Epstein, who has been called America's leading essayist. He is a lecturer in English and writing at Northwestern and for 22 years he was editor of The American Scholar. His newest book is fiction, a collection of 18 stories. Its title is Fabulous Small Jews, which is taken from Karl Shapiro's poem "Hospital.” Here's the quote:
This is the Oxford of all sicknesses
Kings have lain here and fabulous small
Jews
And actresses whose legs were always
news.
Perhaps at this point you will want to put down Epstein and go check out Shapiro. A worthy reaction, and one Epstein would probably applaud. But do come back to these stories.
All are told by older Jewish men, not particularly religious, who have grown up in Chicago (West Rogers Park, mostly), and all of whom have an ironic sense of humor about their world. Lawyers, artists, a commodities trader, a professor -- and the themes are as varied as the cast: second chances, the bind of family love, racial barriers, what happens if a convict writes to you, and more. Like Rosen's rye bread -- you don't have to be Jewish to like this book. Just human.
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World is getting 4-star reviews from movie critics. Remember this is based on only two of the 20 books Patrick O'Brian left us when he died in 2000. There's plenty more for you to check out, all written between 1970 and 1999. All are set in the time of the Napoleonic Wars and center on Jack Aubrey and his best friend and shipmate, Dr. Stephen Maturin. Actually, the movie covers very little of Master and Commander, first in the series; you can read this even if you see the movie.
And poetry!
Someone, maybe a student, would love
to receive from you Garrison Keillor's Good Poems, which contains
350 of them. GK has been reading a poem a day to his public radio audience
on his program, The Writer's Almanac. Wallace Stevens, Emily Dickinson,
Shakespeare, Billy Collins, Seamus Heaney -- how could you go wrong? Plus
an introduction by GK that is frank and funny. He says he aims in choosing
his poems at "utter clarity in the face of everything else a person has
to deal with at 7 a.m."
Mysteries!
If you like British police procedurals
with their careful progression of clues to solution, Peter Robinson is
an author one awaits. Chief Inspector Alan Banks of Yorkshire is the main
character. In Close to Home Banks is vacationing in Greece when
he reads in an English paper that the skeleton of a boy has been discovered
back home and identified as his close childhood friend who died in 1965.
Banks goes home at once and shortly after gets involved in the disappearance
of another teenager, this one part of the world of jazz musicians, a world
very familiar to a jazz devotee like Banks. It's all like a jigsaw puzzle,
to rely on a well used comparison, and very satisfying to see the pieces
drop into place.
Sara Paretsky writes with such a sure hand about her strong-willed private investigator, V. I. Warshawski, that it's a pleasure to travel through the plot with both of them. This time VI has to check on an empty suburban mansion in a wealthy Chicago suburb; a longtime (and good-paying) client claims his 91 year-old mother, who used to live in that house, sees lights on at night. VI finds a dead journalist, who had been investigating a case of blacklisting, dating back to Senator McCarthy's days. Hence the book's name -- Blacklist. Soon VI realizes someone wants her out of the way. It's all very smoothly done.
Happy, happy holidays!
-- Alice Racher