Jeff Abbott's 'Fear'
By Edward Nawotka
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Sunday, August 13, 2006
As a rule, when an author opts for a one-word title, you can be confident he's gunning for the commercial big time. Think of "Frankenstein," "Dracula," "Shogun," "Jaws." Single letter titles, such as "V," "G" and "Z," are strictly reserved for the highbrow stuff.
Last year, Austin writer Jeff Abbott, the author of seven paperbacks, had his first hardcover published. Appropriately, he went with a one-word title: "Panic," etched in ruby red type against a white background, as if a killer had painted the book in blood. A thriller about Evan Casher, a twentysomething documentary filmmaker who gets embroiled in a web of espionage and murder that stretches from Texas to London, it was intended as Abbott's breakthrough book. Mission accomplished: "Panic" has been optioned by The Weinstein Co. movie studio, with a screenwriter and director attached.
Abbott's latest one-word-title novel, "Fear," is the tale of Miles Kendrick, a mob lackey turned state's witness who is hiding out in Santa Fe, N.M., as part of a federal witness protection program. Miles is in therapy to deal with the post-traumatic stress disorder he's suffered since gunning down his best friend during an FBI takedown gone wrong. When his therapist is killed in an explosion, a variety of thugs descend on picturesque Santa Fe in search of some secret computer files. Soon, Miles begins piecing together the story, which involves secret experiments that are being performed on people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. He eventually hooks up with a "Survivor"-type reality show winner and an Iraq war veteran to foil this plot, and Abbott puts the action into overdrive, sending his characters on a road trip to Yosemite, where he stages a memorable chase scene.
Fans of Abbott's earlier books — four novels featuring Jordan Poteet, a librarian-cum-detective in a small Texas town, and a second series focused on Whit Mosley, a judge in a crime-ridden Gulf coast town — might be disconcerted by his transformation into a retailer of guns-ablazing thrills. But authors have every right to try new things — to leave behind the security blanket of established characters, to draw in new readers, to court Hollywood with some bang-bang-bang.
Unfortunately, Abbott's big jump has fallen a little short: "Panic" amounted to little more than one long chase scene. This isn't entirely a criticism; Abbott writes great chase scenes and the book's big set piece, a running gun-battle through New Orleans' Audubon Park, was especially well-done. What the book lacked was the sense of something serious at stake.
The major plot point in "Panic" involved encrypted computer files, which are sort of abstract, no matter what data they contain. And the book's villains were named Dezz and Jargos, which made them sound like European soccer hooligans. It was all a bit breathless and, ultimately, pointless. (The shocking surprise that is revealed at the end seemed more apt for an episode of "Alias" than a hardcover thriller.)
"Fear," once again, revolves around missing computer files and once again gives the bad guys European-sounding surnames — Groote, Quantrill and Sorenson. (The good guys — Allison, Celeste and Nathan — are all American.)
This time around, at least, there's something real at stake: Given the many damaged veterans who are returning to the U.S. from Iraq, the focus on post-traumatic stress disorder lends the book an air of timeliness. "Fear" doesn't offer as sophisticated a reflection of a contemporary, verifiable reality as, say, Dan Fesperman's recent thriller "The Prisoner of Guantanamo," but it's more tethered to the here-and-now than "Panic." Abbott has done his research and is especially edifying about the stress hormones, neurotransmitters and beta-receptors — collectively described by one doctor as "fear juice" — that enhance a traumatic memory and burn it into various regions of the brain.
That said, Abbott's readers had better prepare for a bit of trauma themselves. In "Fear," Abbott has dramatically amplified the level of violence. There are a half-dozen perfunctory scenes in which a minor character, often introduced as a false deus ex machina, is dispatched by an unceremonious double-tap between his or her astonished eyes.
Abbott also serves up a generous helping of gratuitous bloodshed and carnage, including multiple scenes of torture (one especially gruesome form involves running the tip of a screwdriver along exposed bone), as well as multiple face-bashing and razor-slashing fights.
Just this week the Journal of the American Medical Association published a report describing the neuropsychological effects of fighting in Iraq. It concluded that months of living with heightened adrenaline left soldiers struggling to focus and suffering subtle lapses in memory.
"Fear" has a similar effect: It might leave you temporarily juiced, but you won't remember much about it.
Texas writer Edward Nawotka covers the South for Publishers Weekly and is a nationally syndicated book critic.
Monday, August 14, 2006
Wednesday, July 05, 2006
Flamenco Fever: Interview with novelist Sarah Bird
Flamenco Fever
Former go-go dancer and novelist Sarah Bird learned the artful Spanish dance before she wrote her latest novel
It was love that led Texas novelist Sarah Bird to flamenco.
"I was 20, living in Spain and working at a German scuba diving camp on the Costa Brava," says Bird, who is now 56. "I was also nursing a broken heart from a boyfriend I'd left behind in Albuquerque." Some friends took her to see a flamenco performance, which affected her in profound ways. "It was literally the first physical manifestation I'd ever seen of my own interior emotional landscape."
The artful Spanish dance has been an obsession ever since and provided the inspiration for Bird's latest novel, The Flamenco Academy (Knopf).
The novel is the story of Rae and Didi, childhood friends in Albuquerque. At their high school graduation party, Rae meets Tomas Montenegro, a mysterious young flamenco guitarist. Tomas quickly disappears, however, but that single encounter haunts Rae and her desire to see-and finally seduce Tomas-motivates her to learn to dance flamenco.
Rae and Didi enroll at the University of New Mexico-the only college in America that grants a degree in dance with a flamenco focus -- where they study with Dona Carlota Anaya, a gypsy dancer who recounts her tumultuous life story while drilling her students in el arte. Dona Carlota hectors the girls, calling them burros, while teaching them the relevance of each complicated compas (beat) and brazeo (arm movement).
In a plot that sounds straight out of a play by Federico Garcia Lorca, Rae who earns the nickname "Metronome," and Didi, who's called "Tempest eventually duel and have a falling out over Tomas.
Bird’s writing career began in the 1980s with a series of five romance novels published under the pen name Tory Cates. Then came a run of comic novels that include The Boyfriend School, Alamo House, and The Mommy Club. Her critically acclaimed novel The Yokota Officer's Club (Knopf, 2001), about the daughter of an Air Force pilot who in the 1960s took his wife and children to live on Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, was based on Bird's unusual experiences as a touring go-go dancer in Japan in the '60s.
Bringing the story of The Flamenco Academy to life, by contrast, required some fancy footwork. Over lunch at a Japanese restaurant in Bird's hometown of Austin, the author, who is married and the mother of a 17-year-old son, Gabriel, reveals that she took beginning dance classes at the Festival Flamenco at the University of New Mexico. The event draws the top flamenco artists from around the world for a week each summer to teach and perform. It's easy to imagine the leggy author, who is slim, standing close to six feet, getting the sinuous moves down. (Gabriel came with her and took flamenco guitar lessons. "He learned the rhythm structures of the music, and later back in Austin, was able to interpret them for me," Bird says.)
Though a few notable nonfiction books about flamenco have appeared, including Fernanda Eberstadt's Little Money Street (Knopf) and Jason Webster's Duende (Broadway), the art is notoriously difficult to capture. Among filmmakers, only Carlos Saura's works, which include magnificent flamenco interpretations of Bizet's Carmen and Lorca's Blood Wedding, are considered worthy.
Bird's very first writing assignments for pulp magazines of the 1970s, served her well in dealing with the exaggerated operatic nature of flamenco and its outrageous gypsy practitioners "Those magazines wanted blue collar, first-person anonymous stories, like 'I kidnapped my own child' and 'I seduced my parish priest,'" she says.
The hardscrabble Andalusian gypsies of The Flamenco Academy relish their working-class bawdiness. In one scene, a young gypsy, a girl who "likes to have sex in the wrong place" is nicknamed El Peste (The Stink). Later, a gypsy mocks another woman by suggesting her husband would prefer that drink some mint tea to fatten her nether parts so she can enjoy sex.
Throughout the novel, Bird tries to balance the sacred and the profane. Flamenco is alternately referred to in the novel as "tragedy in the first person," and less reverentially as "obsessive compulsive disorder with a beat."
The plot of The Flamenco Academy ultimately turns on a question about authenticity and whether puro flamenco can be performed by someone who is not gitana por los cuatro costaos, that is to say "gypsy on all four sides." Likewise, Bird says she's concerned that some aficionados within the flamenco community may find her depiction of el arte inauthentic. "They are the most insidery insiders you've ever met and they have these constant arguments about purity. Flamenco is as regimented as haiku, and the entire experience of trying to get the specificity down on paper was extremely intimidating. I've been worried by how the puro puros are going to take it since the start."
Like the sore backs and joint damage flamenco dancers endure from the constant stamping of their feet, that worry took its own toll on Bird, who rewrote the story five times over the course of 15 years. "I originally envisioned this as a novella," she says of the book which now runs to 381 pages. "First, I wrote it as a murder mystery. Then I did a version where two characters get married and have a child." She even turned the story into a screenplay that was optioned by Meatloaf, with J-Lo's husband Marc Anthony discussed as the possible star. "Finally," she says, "I just gave up and finished it."
She's spent as much time writing this novel as she has raising her son.
Bird's next novel, tentatively titled Weightless, depicts the world of Texas socialites and the internet bubble burst of the early 90s. The world is seen through the eyes of a woman married to a man who bears an uncanny resemblance to George W. Bush, and returns Bird, who also pens Texas Monthly's popular back page humor column, to the broad comedic tone that marked her books prior to Yokota.
Bird doesn't want to leave the impression that writing The Flamenco Academy was all hardship. Taking the dance classes at Festival Flamenco, she says, was "an uproarious amount of fun. One thing I can testify to is that I can really get my groove on and after ten days of flamenco hand twirls, my Carpal Tunnel was completely cured."
Former go-go dancer and novelist Sarah Bird learned the artful Spanish dance before she wrote her latest novel
It was love that led Texas novelist Sarah Bird to flamenco.
"I was 20, living in Spain and working at a German scuba diving camp on the Costa Brava," says Bird, who is now 56. "I was also nursing a broken heart from a boyfriend I'd left behind in Albuquerque." Some friends took her to see a flamenco performance, which affected her in profound ways. "It was literally the first physical manifestation I'd ever seen of my own interior emotional landscape."
The artful Spanish dance has been an obsession ever since and provided the inspiration for Bird's latest novel, The Flamenco Academy (Knopf).
The novel is the story of Rae and Didi, childhood friends in Albuquerque. At their high school graduation party, Rae meets Tomas Montenegro, a mysterious young flamenco guitarist. Tomas quickly disappears, however, but that single encounter haunts Rae and her desire to see-and finally seduce Tomas-motivates her to learn to dance flamenco.
Rae and Didi enroll at the University of New Mexico-the only college in America that grants a degree in dance with a flamenco focus -- where they study with Dona Carlota Anaya, a gypsy dancer who recounts her tumultuous life story while drilling her students in el arte. Dona Carlota hectors the girls, calling them burros, while teaching them the relevance of each complicated compas (beat) and brazeo (arm movement).
In a plot that sounds straight out of a play by Federico Garcia Lorca, Rae who earns the nickname "Metronome," and Didi, who's called "Tempest eventually duel and have a falling out over Tomas.
Bird’s writing career began in the 1980s with a series of five romance novels published under the pen name Tory Cates. Then came a run of comic novels that include The Boyfriend School, Alamo House, and The Mommy Club. Her critically acclaimed novel The Yokota Officer's Club (Knopf, 2001), about the daughter of an Air Force pilot who in the 1960s took his wife and children to live on Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, was based on Bird's unusual experiences as a touring go-go dancer in Japan in the '60s.
Bringing the story of The Flamenco Academy to life, by contrast, required some fancy footwork. Over lunch at a Japanese restaurant in Bird's hometown of Austin, the author, who is married and the mother of a 17-year-old son, Gabriel, reveals that she took beginning dance classes at the Festival Flamenco at the University of New Mexico. The event draws the top flamenco artists from around the world for a week each summer to teach and perform. It's easy to imagine the leggy author, who is slim, standing close to six feet, getting the sinuous moves down. (Gabriel came with her and took flamenco guitar lessons. "He learned the rhythm structures of the music, and later back in Austin, was able to interpret them for me," Bird says.)
Though a few notable nonfiction books about flamenco have appeared, including Fernanda Eberstadt's Little Money Street (Knopf) and Jason Webster's Duende (Broadway), the art is notoriously difficult to capture. Among filmmakers, only Carlos Saura's works, which include magnificent flamenco interpretations of Bizet's Carmen and Lorca's Blood Wedding, are considered worthy.
Bird's very first writing assignments for pulp magazines of the 1970s, served her well in dealing with the exaggerated operatic nature of flamenco and its outrageous gypsy practitioners "Those magazines wanted blue collar, first-person anonymous stories, like 'I kidnapped my own child' and 'I seduced my parish priest,'" she says.
The hardscrabble Andalusian gypsies of The Flamenco Academy relish their working-class bawdiness. In one scene, a young gypsy, a girl who "likes to have sex in the wrong place" is nicknamed El Peste (The Stink). Later, a gypsy mocks another woman by suggesting her husband would prefer that drink some mint tea to fatten her nether parts so she can enjoy sex.
Throughout the novel, Bird tries to balance the sacred and the profane. Flamenco is alternately referred to in the novel as "tragedy in the first person," and less reverentially as "obsessive compulsive disorder with a beat."
The plot of The Flamenco Academy ultimately turns on a question about authenticity and whether puro flamenco can be performed by someone who is not gitana por los cuatro costaos, that is to say "gypsy on all four sides." Likewise, Bird says she's concerned that some aficionados within the flamenco community may find her depiction of el arte inauthentic. "They are the most insidery insiders you've ever met and they have these constant arguments about purity. Flamenco is as regimented as haiku, and the entire experience of trying to get the specificity down on paper was extremely intimidating. I've been worried by how the puro puros are going to take it since the start."
Like the sore backs and joint damage flamenco dancers endure from the constant stamping of their feet, that worry took its own toll on Bird, who rewrote the story five times over the course of 15 years. "I originally envisioned this as a novella," she says of the book which now runs to 381 pages. "First, I wrote it as a murder mystery. Then I did a version where two characters get married and have a child." She even turned the story into a screenplay that was optioned by Meatloaf, with J-Lo's husband Marc Anthony discussed as the possible star. "Finally," she says, "I just gave up and finished it."
She's spent as much time writing this novel as she has raising her son.
Bird's next novel, tentatively titled Weightless, depicts the world of Texas socialites and the internet bubble burst of the early 90s. The world is seen through the eyes of a woman married to a man who bears an uncanny resemblance to George W. Bush, and returns Bird, who also pens Texas Monthly's popular back page humor column, to the broad comedic tone that marked her books prior to Yokota.
Bird doesn't want to leave the impression that writing The Flamenco Academy was all hardship. Taking the dance classes at Festival Flamenco, she says, was "an uproarious amount of fun. One thing I can testify to is that I can really get my groove on and after ten days of flamenco hand twirls, my Carpal Tunnel was completely cured."
Sunday, June 18, 2006
Greg Palast Wants to Blow Your Mind
Palast wants to blow your mind
Who's afraid of Greg Palast? According to the best-selling, left-wing muckraker, here's who should be: Ann Coulter, Dick Cheney and the entire American press corps
By Edward Nawotka
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Sunday, June 18, 2006
Investigative journalist Greg Palast doesn't do anything the easy way. He wires himself up and tries to get the political and corporate elite to admit to malfeasance. He "liberates" confidential documents from places such as the World Bank.
Though Palast is a born and bred American, his incendiary stories usually appear in the U.K., on BBC television's "Newsnight" and in the Guardian newspaper. In the U.S., he's shunted onto fringe radio stations such as Pacifica. Among the mainstream media outlets, only Harper's magazine has dared run his stories. Even so, his 2004 book, "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy," was a best-seller here.
Palast's new book, "Armed Madhouse: Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China Floats, Bush Sinks, The Scheme to Steal 'O8, No Child's Behind Left, and Other Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War," is breathless and cryptic and must be read to be believed. (Or, for many, disbelieved.) It appears to offer documentary proof that there really are secret and not-so-secret rulers of the world.
I spoke to Palast, who regularly appears on television wearing a Sam Spade-style fedora and trench coat, by phone from San Francisco, where he was launching his U.S. tour with an appearance on Amy Goodman's Democracy Now! radio show. He is, if anything, even more provocative in conversation than he is in print, if only because he doesn't have the opportunity to footnote some of his more lurid accusations — not all of which the American-Statesman can vouch for. When I asked him how it felt to go head-to-head on the best-seller list with right-wing pundit Ann Coulter, whose book "Godless" went on sale the same day as "Armed Madhouse," he suggested that her popularity is a mirage, accusing her supporters of simply buying her books en masse and dumping them in the ocean. He offered no proof for this assertion.
Austin American-Statesman: You talk about there being a class war in the U.S. and describe the flooding of New Orleans as its "Gettysburg." Would you explain?
Greg Palast: It's the second time that this happened. When the levees burst in 1927, it was a period of time when everybody said the Republican Party was going to control the U.S. government for the rest of the century. But then one Democratic politician stood up and said, "The rich are killing us." This one guy — Huey Long — stood up and said we need pensions, we need government protection, we need regulation of the power companies that have gone wild and are ripping us off. And he created a program that was later renamed the New Deal and the Democrats ran this country for decades on that. It took bodies floating in the streets of New Orleans for us to realize this is happening again, but (the Republicans) are doing their best to stamp it out.
One of the things that comes across in the book is your faith in the power of the press to make change. Do you still believe in that?
I see the power of the press to disinform. In 1929, Huey Long was able to deliver his message by using a new, uncontrolled medium by going over the airwaves. He was the first to deliver a message that wasn't controlled by the newspaper barons. It was called radio. Now we've got the Internet. That's all we've got at the moment.
You're a big fan of Long's.
I'm a big fan of getting around the privileged class. So, you know, we do have a Huey Long today. He's called Hugo Chavez. When the levees broke in New Orleans we had a president who sent in rescue teams and desalinization plants. It was Chavez, but our State Department sent back the planes. In the book I report on Chavez's assassination — I just thought I'd do it in advance. You know, I reported on two stolen elections (2000 and 2004). Now I'm reporting on 2008 being stolen. I figure if I do it in advance I might be able to affect things.
So what makes your reporting different?
First of all, I wear wires and do secret recording and get oil executives to fess up to planning with Dick Cheney's team what they are going to do with the oil fields of Iraq. Then I've got to go find the documents. It takes two years of hunting and looking. First I had a sense it was there, then there is the confirmation it is there, then I finally get it. Once you get the stuff, a lot of it is highly technical and interpreting it and confirming it is very complicated. No one has the time or interest. Then again, the U.S. press doesn't want to confront power. For example, I had these "caging lists" that came out of the Republican computers. How was I going to prove this was actually a scheme to wipe out black voters? Well, you can stand in their doorway and literally ask, "What is this stuff?" Sometimes you get your answer when the guy turns pale and bolts. The BBC often accepts that as confirmation.
So do you consider yourself a great reporter?
I always appreciate praise, but I don't. You or any other reporter in America could do what I do if you had editors and producers who gave you months to go out and find proof that the Republicans shoplifted the state of Ohio.
You praise the Internet as the medium of the future, yet it is often criticized for factual inaccuracies, often due to the speed at which stories are posted online.
Let me ask you how accurate were Judith Miller's reports on weapons of mass destruction in The New York Times? Of course the Internet has all sorts of garbage on it, but it's also one of the few places you'll get the hard stuff. Anyone can drive a car: a drunk or an ambulance driver.
You blame a lot of our troubles on Texans, from Bush to James Baker. Are you trying to say we should be ashamed of being Texans?
No, it was Texans (such as journalist Jim Hightower) who exposed George Bush. But if there's one place that the class war could not be clearer, that's in the Lone Star State.
Who's afraid of Greg Palast? According to the best-selling, left-wing muckraker, here's who should be: Ann Coulter, Dick Cheney and the entire American press corps
By Edward Nawotka
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Sunday, June 18, 2006
Investigative journalist Greg Palast doesn't do anything the easy way. He wires himself up and tries to get the political and corporate elite to admit to malfeasance. He "liberates" confidential documents from places such as the World Bank.
Though Palast is a born and bred American, his incendiary stories usually appear in the U.K., on BBC television's "Newsnight" and in the Guardian newspaper. In the U.S., he's shunted onto fringe radio stations such as Pacifica. Among the mainstream media outlets, only Harper's magazine has dared run his stories. Even so, his 2004 book, "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy," was a best-seller here.
Palast's new book, "Armed Madhouse: Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China Floats, Bush Sinks, The Scheme to Steal 'O8, No Child's Behind Left, and Other Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War," is breathless and cryptic and must be read to be believed. (Or, for many, disbelieved.) It appears to offer documentary proof that there really are secret and not-so-secret rulers of the world.
I spoke to Palast, who regularly appears on television wearing a Sam Spade-style fedora and trench coat, by phone from San Francisco, where he was launching his U.S. tour with an appearance on Amy Goodman's Democracy Now! radio show. He is, if anything, even more provocative in conversation than he is in print, if only because he doesn't have the opportunity to footnote some of his more lurid accusations — not all of which the American-Statesman can vouch for. When I asked him how it felt to go head-to-head on the best-seller list with right-wing pundit Ann Coulter, whose book "Godless" went on sale the same day as "Armed Madhouse," he suggested that her popularity is a mirage, accusing her supporters of simply buying her books en masse and dumping them in the ocean. He offered no proof for this assertion.
Austin American-Statesman: You talk about there being a class war in the U.S. and describe the flooding of New Orleans as its "Gettysburg." Would you explain?
Greg Palast: It's the second time that this happened. When the levees burst in 1927, it was a period of time when everybody said the Republican Party was going to control the U.S. government for the rest of the century. But then one Democratic politician stood up and said, "The rich are killing us." This one guy — Huey Long — stood up and said we need pensions, we need government protection, we need regulation of the power companies that have gone wild and are ripping us off. And he created a program that was later renamed the New Deal and the Democrats ran this country for decades on that. It took bodies floating in the streets of New Orleans for us to realize this is happening again, but (the Republicans) are doing their best to stamp it out.
One of the things that comes across in the book is your faith in the power of the press to make change. Do you still believe in that?
I see the power of the press to disinform. In 1929, Huey Long was able to deliver his message by using a new, uncontrolled medium by going over the airwaves. He was the first to deliver a message that wasn't controlled by the newspaper barons. It was called radio. Now we've got the Internet. That's all we've got at the moment.
You're a big fan of Long's.
I'm a big fan of getting around the privileged class. So, you know, we do have a Huey Long today. He's called Hugo Chavez. When the levees broke in New Orleans we had a president who sent in rescue teams and desalinization plants. It was Chavez, but our State Department sent back the planes. In the book I report on Chavez's assassination — I just thought I'd do it in advance. You know, I reported on two stolen elections (2000 and 2004). Now I'm reporting on 2008 being stolen. I figure if I do it in advance I might be able to affect things.
So what makes your reporting different?
First of all, I wear wires and do secret recording and get oil executives to fess up to planning with Dick Cheney's team what they are going to do with the oil fields of Iraq. Then I've got to go find the documents. It takes two years of hunting and looking. First I had a sense it was there, then there is the confirmation it is there, then I finally get it. Once you get the stuff, a lot of it is highly technical and interpreting it and confirming it is very complicated. No one has the time or interest. Then again, the U.S. press doesn't want to confront power. For example, I had these "caging lists" that came out of the Republican computers. How was I going to prove this was actually a scheme to wipe out black voters? Well, you can stand in their doorway and literally ask, "What is this stuff?" Sometimes you get your answer when the guy turns pale and bolts. The BBC often accepts that as confirmation.
So do you consider yourself a great reporter?
I always appreciate praise, but I don't. You or any other reporter in America could do what I do if you had editors and producers who gave you months to go out and find proof that the Republicans shoplifted the state of Ohio.
You praise the Internet as the medium of the future, yet it is often criticized for factual inaccuracies, often due to the speed at which stories are posted online.
Let me ask you how accurate were Judith Miller's reports on weapons of mass destruction in The New York Times? Of course the Internet has all sorts of garbage on it, but it's also one of the few places you'll get the hard stuff. Anyone can drive a car: a drunk or an ambulance driver.
You blame a lot of our troubles on Texans, from Bush to James Baker. Are you trying to say we should be ashamed of being Texans?
No, it was Texans (such as journalist Jim Hightower) who exposed George Bush. But if there's one place that the class war could not be clearer, that's in the Lone Star State.
Sunday, June 11, 2006
Bookstore Camp Brings Greek Myths to Life
Bookstore Camp Brings Greek Myths to Life
This story originally appeared in Children's Bookshelf on June 8, 2006 Sign up now!
by Edward Nawotka, Children's Bookshelf -- 6/8/2006
Article
This week BookPeople in Austin, Tex., is hosting a unique summer camp. It’s for nine to 14-year-old fans of Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson & the Olympians series, which include 2005’s The Lightning Thief and this season’s sequel, The Sea of Monsters, both published by Hyperion.
Dubbed Camp Half-Blood, it takes its name from the “half-bloods,” the children of Gods and humans who populate the novels.
The inspiration for the camp came from BookPeople’s Topher Bradfield, who in his job as the store’s outreach coordinator, visits Austin-area elementary schools. Often of late, he says, he found himself reading from the first chapter of The Lightning Thief. “It was a great way to get the boys to pay attention,” he explained.
The subsequent sales that his visits generated—so far, BookPeople has sold more than 400 hardcover copies of The Lightning Thief and another 300 paperbacks, as well as 300 hardcover copies of Sea of Monsters—proved to him that the project would have support within the local reading community.
With Riordan’s blessing, Bradfield concocted an elaborate storyline that relocated the camp from its original fictional location in New Jersey to Austin, under the pretense of needing to re-fashioning The Apple of Discord (which was in part responsible for the Trojan War), which has been broken into 13 pieces. Accordingly, campers are broken up into 13 cabins, each representing a different Greek god—with Zeus and Poseidon at the pinnacle.
This past Saturday night, BookPeople staged an elaborate theatrical “claiming” ceremony—complete with colored smoke, storm sound effects and stage lighting—at which campers were assigned parent deities and given an individual prophecies by the Oracle of Delphi. Various deities and mythical creatures were portrayed by BookPeople employees.
Riordan celebrated his birthday by driving the hour from San Antonio for the festivities. Describing the scene, he sounded awed. “There was Greek dancing drumming and even a man dressed up as a Spartan,” he said. “It was like stepping into my own book, and it was the first clue that something I had written was larger than me.”
A total of 55 campers are participating in the camp. Some have traveled such far-flung areas as New York, Colorado, Arizona, Iowa and Greece to take part. Word spread through Riordan’s Web site, and BookPeople answered queries from as far away as Japan and the U.K.
The city of Austin lent use of Zilker Park’s rock garden, a part of Austin’s public park’s system, as the location for the camp. Activities start at 8 a.m. and involve a daily quest for pieces of the Apple of Discord, lessons on Greek mythology and philosophy from University of Texas and Austin Community College graduate students, swimming, kickball and Frisbee golf. A Greek war re-enactor has been flown in from California to teach Greek battle formations, such as the phalanx.
According to Bradfield, the budget for the camp was $9,500 and sponsors include a local bakery, ice cream parlor and an Arabic bazaar. Bradfield and three Austin public school teachers are acting as camp counselors. Campers paid just $185 for the week, and BookPeople offered five needy students full scholarships.
“The price works out to about $4 per hour for childcare, which I think is quite a bargain,” Bradfield said. He joked that if the camp were a success, there may be opportunities to franchise the concept. “But let’s see how it goes first this year. Steve [Bercu—owner of BookPeople] insisted that this [event would have to] sell out before we make any future plans, and it has.”
This story originally appeared in Children's Bookshelf on June 8, 2006 Sign up now!
by Edward Nawotka, Children's Bookshelf -- 6/8/2006
Article
This week BookPeople in Austin, Tex., is hosting a unique summer camp. It’s for nine to 14-year-old fans of Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson & the Olympians series, which include 2005’s The Lightning Thief and this season’s sequel, The Sea of Monsters, both published by Hyperion.
Dubbed Camp Half-Blood, it takes its name from the “half-bloods,” the children of Gods and humans who populate the novels.
The inspiration for the camp came from BookPeople’s Topher Bradfield, who in his job as the store’s outreach coordinator, visits Austin-area elementary schools. Often of late, he says, he found himself reading from the first chapter of The Lightning Thief. “It was a great way to get the boys to pay attention,” he explained.
The subsequent sales that his visits generated—so far, BookPeople has sold more than 400 hardcover copies of The Lightning Thief and another 300 paperbacks, as well as 300 hardcover copies of Sea of Monsters—proved to him that the project would have support within the local reading community.
With Riordan’s blessing, Bradfield concocted an elaborate storyline that relocated the camp from its original fictional location in New Jersey to Austin, under the pretense of needing to re-fashioning The Apple of Discord (which was in part responsible for the Trojan War), which has been broken into 13 pieces. Accordingly, campers are broken up into 13 cabins, each representing a different Greek god—with Zeus and Poseidon at the pinnacle.
This past Saturday night, BookPeople staged an elaborate theatrical “claiming” ceremony—complete with colored smoke, storm sound effects and stage lighting—at which campers were assigned parent deities and given an individual prophecies by the Oracle of Delphi. Various deities and mythical creatures were portrayed by BookPeople employees.
Riordan celebrated his birthday by driving the hour from San Antonio for the festivities. Describing the scene, he sounded awed. “There was Greek dancing drumming and even a man dressed up as a Spartan,” he said. “It was like stepping into my own book, and it was the first clue that something I had written was larger than me.”
A total of 55 campers are participating in the camp. Some have traveled such far-flung areas as New York, Colorado, Arizona, Iowa and Greece to take part. Word spread through Riordan’s Web site, and BookPeople answered queries from as far away as Japan and the U.K.
The city of Austin lent use of Zilker Park’s rock garden, a part of Austin’s public park’s system, as the location for the camp. Activities start at 8 a.m. and involve a daily quest for pieces of the Apple of Discord, lessons on Greek mythology and philosophy from University of Texas and Austin Community College graduate students, swimming, kickball and Frisbee golf. A Greek war re-enactor has been flown in from California to teach Greek battle formations, such as the phalanx.
According to Bradfield, the budget for the camp was $9,500 and sponsors include a local bakery, ice cream parlor and an Arabic bazaar. Bradfield and three Austin public school teachers are acting as camp counselors. Campers paid just $185 for the week, and BookPeople offered five needy students full scholarships.
“The price works out to about $4 per hour for childcare, which I think is quite a bargain,” Bradfield said. He joked that if the camp were a success, there may be opportunities to franchise the concept. “But let’s see how it goes first this year. Steve [Bercu—owner of BookPeople] insisted that this [event would have to] sell out before we make any future plans, and it has.”
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
Tiger Unleashed: Review of Tiger Force by Michael Sallah
From the San Francisco Chronicle, May 14, 2006
Tiger Force: A True Story of Men and War
By Michael Sallah and Mitch Weiss
LITTLE, BROWN; 403 PAGES; $25.95
During the summer of 1967, U.S. Army Lt. Col. Gerald Morse radioed soldiers operating under his command in the central highlands of Vietnam and barked, "You're the 327th infantry. We want 327 kills." It was an unforgivable statement that would eventually lead to one of the most appalling killing sprees of the Vietnam War and the unwarranted deaths of hundreds of Vietnamese men, women and children.
The unit Morse was addressing, his "Tiger Force," was a group of 45 gung-ho soldiers that made up the reconnaissance platoon attached to the 327th Infantry, a battalion of 900 infantrymen that was just one of three in the 101st Airborne. The Tigers were the most bloodthirsty lot of them all.
Michael Sallah and Mitch Weiss' unsettling "Tiger Force" explains how this motley group of young men from the far corners of the United States became unhinged murderers and why their war crimes went unreported for nearly four decades.
Sallah and Weiss, reporters for the Blade newspaper of Toledo, Ohio, were tipped to the story by a fellow reporter at their newspaper who was bequeathed boxes of secret documents from Henry Tufts, a former head of the Army's Criminal Investigations Command (known as CID), after his death in July 2002.
Their four-part series for the newspaper, outlining the heretofore unknown story, won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. This book offers an even more exhaustive account of Tiger Force's killing rampage and the subsequent efforts by a series of Army investigators to hold the soldiers accountable for their actions.
Sallah and Weiss re-create the events, relying on interviews with 43 Tiger Force veterans. The reporters also went to Vietnam and tracked down now-elderly Vietnamese witnesses and descendants of the victims. Central to their account is the story of Pvt. Sam Ybarra, an American Indian who together with his childhood friend, Kenneth "Boots" Green, joined the Tigers. Initially, the two fought together in the fertile highlands that were one of the principal sources of rice for the North Vietnamese Army. The Army deemed it a strategic necessity for the United States to clear the area of farmers, many of them Buddhists with spiritual ties to the land. Some farmers agreed to be flown to relocation camps, which Ybarra compares to his fellow Indians being relocated. When some of the farmers refuse to leave, the area is deemed a "free-fire zone" -- a confusing designation that still stipulated that soldiers must request permission before shooting. That eventually leads to much unnecessary bloodshed. Typical of these stories is that of an unarmed North Vietnamese soldier taken prisoner whom Ybarra nonchalantly executes by cutting his throat.
The Tigers, forced to remain in the field far longer than others, grow frustrated. Ybarra is among the first Tigers taking trophies, slicing the ears off slain Vietnamese and fashioning them into necklaces. Others collect scalps or teeth. Then, after Green is shot in the head by a sniper, Ybarra snaps. In the most disturbing episode of the book (or frankly almost any book describing American soldiers at war), on the day the Tigers achieved their "magic number" of 327 kills, on Nov. 19, 1967, Ybarra beheads a crying baby.
Unlike numerous filmmakers, from Francis Ford Coppola to Oliver Stone to Stanley Kubrick, who have inadvertently sensationalized some of the same material, the authors do an outstanding job here of maintaining sober detachment as they depict increasingly brutal scenes of amorality. Occasionally, the authors try to rationalize what the soldiers were doing, at one point remarking that the soldiers' frustration, fury and cruelty were the consequence of battle fatigue. "The Tigers were in a rage mode and were shutting down," they write. "When this happens, the soldier undergoes a unique set of physiological changes that few people understand outside combat. The midbrain -- that part of the brain responsible for breathing, heart rate, and blood pressure -- takes over for the forebrain, the part that processes information. The survival instinct takes over." A deeper examination of why the Tigers behaved so terribly would have been welcome, though as reporters this is not the authors' primary responsibility, which is to break news and get the facts down. The second half of the book begins when CID Army officer Gus Asprey, a Vietnam vet born in Austria to a Nazi father, is handed a manila envelope, case "No. 221, the Coy Allegation." Within, a sergeant named Gary Coy describes a soldier named "Sam" severing the head of a baby while fighting in Vietnam. Here the book takes on the tenor of a first-rate legal thriller.
Asprey's investigation would, over the course of a harrowing three years, slowly uncover the Tigers' wrongdoings, all neatly summarized in a 55-page report. The Army was determined to bury the case. It was deemed too similar to the My Lai massacre and too close to Nixon's resignation to warrant pursuing. Within the month, Asprey was exiled to an office in Seoul, South Korea. It took until Tufts' death for the files and the story of Tiger Force to come out in the open.
Sallah and Weiss have done the American public a service by piecing together this story and managing to offer compassion to soldiers who thus far have been left hanging to bear total responsibility for the events. In an era when some pundits excoriate the press for irrelevance and bias, and budget-cutting publishers curtail time-consuming investigative reporting, this is one shining example of how journalism can fulfill its most noble aims: informing, and consequently, empowering the public.
What we -- and our government -- decide to do with that new knowledge is the next question that must be answered.
Edward Nawotka covers the South for Publishers Weekly. He lives in Austin, Texas.
Tiger Force: A True Story of Men and War
By Michael Sallah and Mitch Weiss
LITTLE, BROWN; 403 PAGES; $25.95
During the summer of 1967, U.S. Army Lt. Col. Gerald Morse radioed soldiers operating under his command in the central highlands of Vietnam and barked, "You're the 327th infantry. We want 327 kills." It was an unforgivable statement that would eventually lead to one of the most appalling killing sprees of the Vietnam War and the unwarranted deaths of hundreds of Vietnamese men, women and children.
The unit Morse was addressing, his "Tiger Force," was a group of 45 gung-ho soldiers that made up the reconnaissance platoon attached to the 327th Infantry, a battalion of 900 infantrymen that was just one of three in the 101st Airborne. The Tigers were the most bloodthirsty lot of them all.
Michael Sallah and Mitch Weiss' unsettling "Tiger Force" explains how this motley group of young men from the far corners of the United States became unhinged murderers and why their war crimes went unreported for nearly four decades.
Sallah and Weiss, reporters for the Blade newspaper of Toledo, Ohio, were tipped to the story by a fellow reporter at their newspaper who was bequeathed boxes of secret documents from Henry Tufts, a former head of the Army's Criminal Investigations Command (known as CID), after his death in July 2002.
Their four-part series for the newspaper, outlining the heretofore unknown story, won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. This book offers an even more exhaustive account of Tiger Force's killing rampage and the subsequent efforts by a series of Army investigators to hold the soldiers accountable for their actions.
Sallah and Weiss re-create the events, relying on interviews with 43 Tiger Force veterans. The reporters also went to Vietnam and tracked down now-elderly Vietnamese witnesses and descendants of the victims. Central to their account is the story of Pvt. Sam Ybarra, an American Indian who together with his childhood friend, Kenneth "Boots" Green, joined the Tigers. Initially, the two fought together in the fertile highlands that were one of the principal sources of rice for the North Vietnamese Army. The Army deemed it a strategic necessity for the United States to clear the area of farmers, many of them Buddhists with spiritual ties to the land. Some farmers agreed to be flown to relocation camps, which Ybarra compares to his fellow Indians being relocated. When some of the farmers refuse to leave, the area is deemed a "free-fire zone" -- a confusing designation that still stipulated that soldiers must request permission before shooting. That eventually leads to much unnecessary bloodshed. Typical of these stories is that of an unarmed North Vietnamese soldier taken prisoner whom Ybarra nonchalantly executes by cutting his throat.
The Tigers, forced to remain in the field far longer than others, grow frustrated. Ybarra is among the first Tigers taking trophies, slicing the ears off slain Vietnamese and fashioning them into necklaces. Others collect scalps or teeth. Then, after Green is shot in the head by a sniper, Ybarra snaps. In the most disturbing episode of the book (or frankly almost any book describing American soldiers at war), on the day the Tigers achieved their "magic number" of 327 kills, on Nov. 19, 1967, Ybarra beheads a crying baby.
Unlike numerous filmmakers, from Francis Ford Coppola to Oliver Stone to Stanley Kubrick, who have inadvertently sensationalized some of the same material, the authors do an outstanding job here of maintaining sober detachment as they depict increasingly brutal scenes of amorality. Occasionally, the authors try to rationalize what the soldiers were doing, at one point remarking that the soldiers' frustration, fury and cruelty were the consequence of battle fatigue. "The Tigers were in a rage mode and were shutting down," they write. "When this happens, the soldier undergoes a unique set of physiological changes that few people understand outside combat. The midbrain -- that part of the brain responsible for breathing, heart rate, and blood pressure -- takes over for the forebrain, the part that processes information. The survival instinct takes over." A deeper examination of why the Tigers behaved so terribly would have been welcome, though as reporters this is not the authors' primary responsibility, which is to break news and get the facts down. The second half of the book begins when CID Army officer Gus Asprey, a Vietnam vet born in Austria to a Nazi father, is handed a manila envelope, case "No. 221, the Coy Allegation." Within, a sergeant named Gary Coy describes a soldier named "Sam" severing the head of a baby while fighting in Vietnam. Here the book takes on the tenor of a first-rate legal thriller.
Asprey's investigation would, over the course of a harrowing three years, slowly uncover the Tigers' wrongdoings, all neatly summarized in a 55-page report. The Army was determined to bury the case. It was deemed too similar to the My Lai massacre and too close to Nixon's resignation to warrant pursuing. Within the month, Asprey was exiled to an office in Seoul, South Korea. It took until Tufts' death for the files and the story of Tiger Force to come out in the open.
Sallah and Weiss have done the American public a service by piecing together this story and managing to offer compassion to soldiers who thus far have been left hanging to bear total responsibility for the events. In an era when some pundits excoriate the press for irrelevance and bias, and budget-cutting publishers curtail time-consuming investigative reporting, this is one shining example of how journalism can fulfill its most noble aims: informing, and consequently, empowering the public.
What we -- and our government -- decide to do with that new knowledge is the next question that must be answered.
Edward Nawotka covers the South for Publishers Weekly. He lives in Austin, Texas.
Monday, April 24, 2006
Review: Challenger Park by Stephen Harrigan
Astronaut's challenges aren't just orbital
Review of Challenger Park by Stephen Harrigan from the San Francisco Chronicle
KNOPF; 397 PAGES; $24.95
The space shuttle blasts off on a column of fire equivalent in force to an erupting volcano. The ride into orbit 240 miles above the Earth takes a mere eight minutes. Despite its brevity, the shuttle trip remains perhaps the most extraordinary journey a human can make.
However, familiarity and indifference have stripped space flight of much of its wonder and romance. The "heraldry of old-time space flight" has vanished," writes Stephen Harrigan in his dazzling new novel, "Challenger Park." What we remember most vividly are the disasters, such as the Challenger shuttle exploding 73 seconds after liftoff in 1986 and the Columbia breaking up on re-entry on Feb. 1, 2003. Lucy Kincheloe, the astronaut at the heart of Harrigan's book, is aware of her diminished status. She wryly remarks, "It seemed to her that space travel in her time had lost more in vision than it had gained in viability -- the original quest had been forsaken or forgotten, and that she and the other shuttle astronauts were mostly in the service of keeping the practicality of space alive until a bold new direction could be charted." There's no indication of what she would have thought of President Bush's January 2004 announcement about funding a return mission to the moon and a trip to Mars.
Harrigan has been a longtime contributor to Texas Monthly and is the author of six previous books, including the best-selling novel "The Gates of the Alamo." He skillfully weaves a surfeit of detail about the contemporary astronaut's lot in life into a compelling and moving narrative that makes for one of the most extraordinary novels of the year.
Harrigan's novel begins as Kincheloe's husband, Brian, returns to Earth after making his second serious mistake while in orbit. As his career begins to freefall, hers ascends, and she's assigned her first mission. Now she must endure marathon days of training while juggling an increasingly bitter husband and her two children, a 7-year-old boy suffering from acute asthma and a 3-year-old daughter. Soon, she finds herself attracted to Walt, a recent widower and the NASA staffer in charge of her training.
The milieu is Clear Lake, Texas, the modest company town serving NASA's Johnson Space Center, 20 miles south of Houston. It's the kind of characterless, strip-mall-centric exurb endemic to Texas, though one distinguished by a giant fiberglass astronaut atop the local McDonald's. Unlike the macho, testosterone-fueled lives of male shuttle astronauts described in other books, such as Mike Mullane's recent memoir "Riding Rockets," Lucy's life most often resembles that of a soccer mom: driving the minivan to and from the local elementary school (this one with a hallway lined with photos of "Astronaut Moms and Dads"), stopping by Starbucks and scheduling babysitters. Walt's life is even more mundane, the highlight being a bit of banter with the waitress at Luby's Cafeteria, a cheap restaurant chain that caters to retirees and families, and watching DVDs with his childhood friend, a Catholic priest losing his faith.
The first half of "Challenger Park" revolves around NASA. Harrigan takes us into the cockpit of the shuttle simulator, with its intimidating array of 2,000 switches, and into the pool (and into the murky waters of adultery), where Lucy mimics the movements required for her forthcoming space walk, in which she will be encased in a spacesuit "as bulky and unmaneuverable as a parade float." Harrigan describes the "suffocating dread" before liftoff, and, once they're in space, the surprised mosquito that had boarded the shuttle before the hatches were closed "turning frenzied loops in front of [Lucy's] visor, doing its bewildered best to fly in weightlessness" once they reach space.
There, an unfortunate chain of events will put Lucy's life at risk.
Throughout "Challenger Park," Harrigan questions the roles of ambition, duty, fealty and self-sacrifice in our lives. But always at the heart of this novel is the mystery of love and the relationship that exists between husband and wife, parent and child, God and humanity, man and his dreams, and, quite literally, the Earth and the heavens.
Given that, it's not surprising that unlike a great many writers who depict adults as perpetual adolescents, forever striving for a more prestigious job or a beautiful lover, Harrigan gives his characters real problems that demand maturity, as well as superhuman self-control and sober professionalism. That kind of respect for his characters translates into respect for the reader.
Harrigan may not yet be well known outside of his home state, but this book -- as scintillating and brilliant as the ocean of stars in a clear night sky -- easily makes him candidate for the best writer living in Texas (Larry McMurtry now lives most of the year in New Mexico) and certainly puts him in the top tier of American novelists.
Review of Challenger Park by Stephen Harrigan from the San Francisco Chronicle
KNOPF; 397 PAGES; $24.95
The space shuttle blasts off on a column of fire equivalent in force to an erupting volcano. The ride into orbit 240 miles above the Earth takes a mere eight minutes. Despite its brevity, the shuttle trip remains perhaps the most extraordinary journey a human can make.
However, familiarity and indifference have stripped space flight of much of its wonder and romance. The "heraldry of old-time space flight" has vanished," writes Stephen Harrigan in his dazzling new novel, "Challenger Park." What we remember most vividly are the disasters, such as the Challenger shuttle exploding 73 seconds after liftoff in 1986 and the Columbia breaking up on re-entry on Feb. 1, 2003. Lucy Kincheloe, the astronaut at the heart of Harrigan's book, is aware of her diminished status. She wryly remarks, "It seemed to her that space travel in her time had lost more in vision than it had gained in viability -- the original quest had been forsaken or forgotten, and that she and the other shuttle astronauts were mostly in the service of keeping the practicality of space alive until a bold new direction could be charted." There's no indication of what she would have thought of President Bush's January 2004 announcement about funding a return mission to the moon and a trip to Mars.
Harrigan has been a longtime contributor to Texas Monthly and is the author of six previous books, including the best-selling novel "The Gates of the Alamo." He skillfully weaves a surfeit of detail about the contemporary astronaut's lot in life into a compelling and moving narrative that makes for one of the most extraordinary novels of the year.
Harrigan's novel begins as Kincheloe's husband, Brian, returns to Earth after making his second serious mistake while in orbit. As his career begins to freefall, hers ascends, and she's assigned her first mission. Now she must endure marathon days of training while juggling an increasingly bitter husband and her two children, a 7-year-old boy suffering from acute asthma and a 3-year-old daughter. Soon, she finds herself attracted to Walt, a recent widower and the NASA staffer in charge of her training.
The milieu is Clear Lake, Texas, the modest company town serving NASA's Johnson Space Center, 20 miles south of Houston. It's the kind of characterless, strip-mall-centric exurb endemic to Texas, though one distinguished by a giant fiberglass astronaut atop the local McDonald's. Unlike the macho, testosterone-fueled lives of male shuttle astronauts described in other books, such as Mike Mullane's recent memoir "Riding Rockets," Lucy's life most often resembles that of a soccer mom: driving the minivan to and from the local elementary school (this one with a hallway lined with photos of "Astronaut Moms and Dads"), stopping by Starbucks and scheduling babysitters. Walt's life is even more mundane, the highlight being a bit of banter with the waitress at Luby's Cafeteria, a cheap restaurant chain that caters to retirees and families, and watching DVDs with his childhood friend, a Catholic priest losing his faith.
The first half of "Challenger Park" revolves around NASA. Harrigan takes us into the cockpit of the shuttle simulator, with its intimidating array of 2,000 switches, and into the pool (and into the murky waters of adultery), where Lucy mimics the movements required for her forthcoming space walk, in which she will be encased in a spacesuit "as bulky and unmaneuverable as a parade float." Harrigan describes the "suffocating dread" before liftoff, and, once they're in space, the surprised mosquito that had boarded the shuttle before the hatches were closed "turning frenzied loops in front of [Lucy's] visor, doing its bewildered best to fly in weightlessness" once they reach space.
There, an unfortunate chain of events will put Lucy's life at risk.
Throughout "Challenger Park," Harrigan questions the roles of ambition, duty, fealty and self-sacrifice in our lives. But always at the heart of this novel is the mystery of love and the relationship that exists between husband and wife, parent and child, God and humanity, man and his dreams, and, quite literally, the Earth and the heavens.
Given that, it's not surprising that unlike a great many writers who depict adults as perpetual adolescents, forever striving for a more prestigious job or a beautiful lover, Harrigan gives his characters real problems that demand maturity, as well as superhuman self-control and sober professionalism. That kind of respect for his characters translates into respect for the reader.
Harrigan may not yet be well known outside of his home state, but this book -- as scintillating and brilliant as the ocean of stars in a clear night sky -- easily makes him candidate for the best writer living in Texas (Larry McMurtry now lives most of the year in New Mexico) and certainly puts him in the top tier of American novelists.
Sunday, March 26, 2006
Azar Nafisi in Austin
Imagination can change reality, Iranian expatriate says
Azar Nafisi discusses 'Reading Lolita in Tehran' and her upcoming Austin event.
By Edward Nawotka
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Sunday, March 26, 2006
It probably struck more than a few people as naïve when, three years ago, the U.S. State Department recruited 15 writers — including Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon and then poet laureate Billy Collins — to contribute to an anthology of essays promoting America to Arabic-speaking nations. Cynics probably wondered if literature was really the way to win the hearts of hostile Middle Easterners.
Don't count Azar Nafisi among the cynics. Her surprise best-selling memoir, "Reading Lolita in Tehran," describes how Nafisi, after being fired from her job as an English professor at Tehran University for refusing to wear a veil, taught a clandestine literature class to seven Iranian women. Together, they relied on banned American literature, such as Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita" and F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" to sustain their dreams of freedom amid severe repression.
Nafisi, who emigrated to the U.S. in 1997, comes to Austin to give a talk on Wednesday as part of Spark: KLRU's Engaging Speaker Series. Currently a visiting fellow at Johns Hopkins University, Nafisi spoke with us via phone from her home in Washington, D.C.
Austin American-Statesman: Does your lecture here in Austin have a topic?
Azar Nafisi: I want to talk about the importance of imagination to culture and the way in which it transforms our reality and our interpretation of it. I want to link that to my experiences in Iran, a society that is culturally suppressed, in order to create a form of dialogue between the two systems and cultures. There is a way literature reveals our universal aspirations.
How has your life changed since publication of the book?
Dramatically. When my book came out, my publisher wanted me to go to the usual cities. I told them I wanted to discover America instead, so I started my tour with small cities in Ohio and went through many of the states, red and blue. One of the things that amazed me was all the book groups I discovered. It was life-transforming experience. I realized that I was not alone.
You mention in the book that you visited Austin in the 1970s when you were getting your doctoral degree at the University of Oklahoma. What were your impressions?
What I remember is the University of Texas had a great population of Iranian students, many of whom were at that time active against the shah. Now I wish I had made several trips and paid more attention. There is a large population of Persians in Texas, especially in Houston. My cousin teaches at Rice, where he was chair of the media department.
There's an Iranian writer in Houston named Farnoosh Moshiri, who just published the novel "Against Gravity."
She's a fine memoirist as well. Iranians, especially Iranian women, are active in writing. I was recently in San Jose and met with Lila Azam Zanganeh, who is the editor of the Iranian anthology "My Sister, Guard Your Veil; My Brother, Guard Your Eyes." These people try to create the alternative voice.
Such as the graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi?
I appreciate her comic strip novels ("Persepolis," "Embroideries") because the form itself challenges the totalitarian mind-set.
Are you disappointed with the paucity of translated books available in the U.S.?
Lack of knowledge about other parts of the world is one of the main problems here. People think politics has nothing to do with reading stories. But a lot of times, the literature shows what politics is trying to hide. Think of the Iranian mystic poets: Rumi or Hafiz. These writers were the most adamant critics of hypocritical clerics who "Flog people in public, drink wine in private."
Is religious fundamentalism, essentially, the product of laziness — a refusal to read closely and put work into interpreting a text, rather than just taking something literally?
Poor reading, like poor writing, is imposing what you already know on texts. You should go into reading to discover, not to reaffirm what you know. This applies especially to religious readers. But it even applies to secular readers, like Stalinists — they impose their own wishes and truth. That is very dangerous reading. You see that in this country a lot. You see people only reading about themselves. Women reading about women. But I'm a woman and I want to read about men, because that's what I don't know.
You mentioned Lila Azam Zanganeh. She, too, is writing a book about Nabokov. What is his appeal to Iranians?
Almost every major novel he writes relates to the state of exile. In his most political novels, such as "Invitation to a Beheading," the protagonist is an exile in his own country. What I completely identify with is the idea of homelessness. When you're in search of a home, you take what a country offers you, especially works of the imagination. Literature and imagination are portable. For Nabokov, his real home became books.
Did being a woman in a repressive Islamic society contribute to your sensitivity to literature?
Yes, a woman who has covered her skin all her life and walks by the seaside and feels the sun on her skin and wind in her hair feels it differently than someone who has felt it all her life. But I would not advise that people live in terribly repressive countries to become sensitized to literature.
Azar Nafisi discusses 'Reading Lolita in Tehran' and her upcoming Austin event.
By Edward Nawotka
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Sunday, March 26, 2006
It probably struck more than a few people as naïve when, three years ago, the U.S. State Department recruited 15 writers — including Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon and then poet laureate Billy Collins — to contribute to an anthology of essays promoting America to Arabic-speaking nations. Cynics probably wondered if literature was really the way to win the hearts of hostile Middle Easterners.
Don't count Azar Nafisi among the cynics. Her surprise best-selling memoir, "Reading Lolita in Tehran," describes how Nafisi, after being fired from her job as an English professor at Tehran University for refusing to wear a veil, taught a clandestine literature class to seven Iranian women. Together, they relied on banned American literature, such as Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita" and F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" to sustain their dreams of freedom amid severe repression.
Nafisi, who emigrated to the U.S. in 1997, comes to Austin to give a talk on Wednesday as part of Spark: KLRU's Engaging Speaker Series. Currently a visiting fellow at Johns Hopkins University, Nafisi spoke with us via phone from her home in Washington, D.C.
Austin American-Statesman: Does your lecture here in Austin have a topic?
Azar Nafisi: I want to talk about the importance of imagination to culture and the way in which it transforms our reality and our interpretation of it. I want to link that to my experiences in Iran, a society that is culturally suppressed, in order to create a form of dialogue between the two systems and cultures. There is a way literature reveals our universal aspirations.
How has your life changed since publication of the book?
Dramatically. When my book came out, my publisher wanted me to go to the usual cities. I told them I wanted to discover America instead, so I started my tour with small cities in Ohio and went through many of the states, red and blue. One of the things that amazed me was all the book groups I discovered. It was life-transforming experience. I realized that I was not alone.
You mention in the book that you visited Austin in the 1970s when you were getting your doctoral degree at the University of Oklahoma. What were your impressions?
What I remember is the University of Texas had a great population of Iranian students, many of whom were at that time active against the shah. Now I wish I had made several trips and paid more attention. There is a large population of Persians in Texas, especially in Houston. My cousin teaches at Rice, where he was chair of the media department.
There's an Iranian writer in Houston named Farnoosh Moshiri, who just published the novel "Against Gravity."
She's a fine memoirist as well. Iranians, especially Iranian women, are active in writing. I was recently in San Jose and met with Lila Azam Zanganeh, who is the editor of the Iranian anthology "My Sister, Guard Your Veil; My Brother, Guard Your Eyes." These people try to create the alternative voice.
Such as the graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi?
I appreciate her comic strip novels ("Persepolis," "Embroideries") because the form itself challenges the totalitarian mind-set.
Are you disappointed with the paucity of translated books available in the U.S.?
Lack of knowledge about other parts of the world is one of the main problems here. People think politics has nothing to do with reading stories. But a lot of times, the literature shows what politics is trying to hide. Think of the Iranian mystic poets: Rumi or Hafiz. These writers were the most adamant critics of hypocritical clerics who "Flog people in public, drink wine in private."
Is religious fundamentalism, essentially, the product of laziness — a refusal to read closely and put work into interpreting a text, rather than just taking something literally?
Poor reading, like poor writing, is imposing what you already know on texts. You should go into reading to discover, not to reaffirm what you know. This applies especially to religious readers. But it even applies to secular readers, like Stalinists — they impose their own wishes and truth. That is very dangerous reading. You see that in this country a lot. You see people only reading about themselves. Women reading about women. But I'm a woman and I want to read about men, because that's what I don't know.
You mentioned Lila Azam Zanganeh. She, too, is writing a book about Nabokov. What is his appeal to Iranians?
Almost every major novel he writes relates to the state of exile. In his most political novels, such as "Invitation to a Beheading," the protagonist is an exile in his own country. What I completely identify with is the idea of homelessness. When you're in search of a home, you take what a country offers you, especially works of the imagination. Literature and imagination are portable. For Nabokov, his real home became books.
Did being a woman in a repressive Islamic society contribute to your sensitivity to literature?
Yes, a woman who has covered her skin all her life and walks by the seaside and feels the sun on her skin and wind in her hair feels it differently than someone who has felt it all her life. But I would not advise that people live in terribly repressive countries to become sensitized to literature.
Thursday, March 09, 2006
Books and Mascots at NACS/CAMEX
Books and Mascots at NACS/CAMEX
Publishers Row was sparsely populated at this year's National Association of College Stores and Campus Market Expo (NACS/CAMEX), which took place in Houston March 3-7.
Pearson Higher Education, Penguin Group and Merriam-Webster were there, as was Random House—in a very modest booth, with a single spinner rack of paperbacks and a smattering of new hardcovers. But everywhere you looked the emphasis was on college logo-laden swag: from sweatshirts and backpacks to beer cozies shaped like jerseys and fight-song-singing bottle openers.
Overall, organizers say some 7,000 people attended, including 2,000 booksellers and 700 vendors. A smattering of authors also appeared, as if to remind the attendees that college bookstores also sold, well, books.
Television news anchor Mike Wallace opened the conference with a speech that served up entertaining anecdotes from his long career, many of which also appear in Between You and Me: A Memoir, out now from Hyperion.
Business guru Daniel Pink, author of A Whole New Mind (Riverhead) started on an upbeat note by reassuring booksellers that they weren't going to be replaced anytime soon. "Right-brain thinkers and creative types will rule the future," he said. Paul Rusesabagina, the Rwandan hotel manager made famous by the film Hotel Rwanda gave a rousing speech about how lone individuals can stand up against seemingly insurmountable odds. His autobiography, An Ordinary Man, has just been published by Viking.
Some 500 people attended the always popular Book & Author breakfast and were charmed by writers Dava Sobel (The Planets), Myla Goldberg (Wickett's Remedy) and Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex). Among the panelists, Ron McLarty, author of The Memory of Running, was sanguine about the writer's lot, despite the decades he spent in obscurity until Stephen King championed his cause. He told the assembled booksellers "I encourage my children to write. It's a great way to start the day. You'd be surprised how a paragraph a day adds up."
One of the best educational sessions at the event featured a formal college debate between teams from the University of Houston and Texas Southern University on the topic of whether computers will eliminate the need for hardcover textbooks in the next five years. Although the consensus was that computers will probably win that battle, the transition isn't likely to happen in the next few years.
Why not sooner? Since the average professor is in his mid-50s, everyone decided they were too set in their ways to completely abandon books.
Publishers Row was sparsely populated at this year's National Association of College Stores and Campus Market Expo (NACS/CAMEX), which took place in Houston March 3-7.
Pearson Higher Education, Penguin Group and Merriam-Webster were there, as was Random House—in a very modest booth, with a single spinner rack of paperbacks and a smattering of new hardcovers. But everywhere you looked the emphasis was on college logo-laden swag: from sweatshirts and backpacks to beer cozies shaped like jerseys and fight-song-singing bottle openers.
Overall, organizers say some 7,000 people attended, including 2,000 booksellers and 700 vendors. A smattering of authors also appeared, as if to remind the attendees that college bookstores also sold, well, books.
Television news anchor Mike Wallace opened the conference with a speech that served up entertaining anecdotes from his long career, many of which also appear in Between You and Me: A Memoir, out now from Hyperion.
Business guru Daniel Pink, author of A Whole New Mind (Riverhead) started on an upbeat note by reassuring booksellers that they weren't going to be replaced anytime soon. "Right-brain thinkers and creative types will rule the future," he said. Paul Rusesabagina, the Rwandan hotel manager made famous by the film Hotel Rwanda gave a rousing speech about how lone individuals can stand up against seemingly insurmountable odds. His autobiography, An Ordinary Man, has just been published by Viking.
Some 500 people attended the always popular Book & Author breakfast and were charmed by writers Dava Sobel (The Planets), Myla Goldberg (Wickett's Remedy) and Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex). Among the panelists, Ron McLarty, author of The Memory of Running, was sanguine about the writer's lot, despite the decades he spent in obscurity until Stephen King championed his cause. He told the assembled booksellers "I encourage my children to write. It's a great way to start the day. You'd be surprised how a paragraph a day adds up."
One of the best educational sessions at the event featured a formal college debate between teams from the University of Houston and Texas Southern University on the topic of whether computers will eliminate the need for hardcover textbooks in the next five years. Although the consensus was that computers will probably win that battle, the transition isn't likely to happen in the next few years.
Why not sooner? Since the average professor is in his mid-50s, everyone decided they were too set in their ways to completely abandon books.
Monday, March 06, 2006
Talking with David Liss, author of 'The Ethical Assassin'
Talking with David Liss, author of 'The Ethical Assassin'
By Edward Nawotka
David Liss got his first taste of the book business as a teenage door-to-door encyclopedia salesman in Florida. Flogging high-priced knowledge, apparently, was the perfect starter job for a would-be professor: After attending Syracuse for his bachelor's degree and Georgia State for his master's , Liss enrolled in a doctoral program at Columbia, where he worked on a thesis about how, in his words, "the mid-18th-century novel reflects and shapes the emergence of the modern idea of personal finance."
He abandoned the thesis after writing his first novel, "A Conspiracy of Paper," a brainy thriller about Benjamin Weaver, a freelance debt collector who investigates the death of his father amid financial foment in early 18th-century London. It won a 2001 Edgar Award for best first mystery novel by an American writer and was followed by another historical thriller, 2003's "The Coffee Trader," and a sequel, 2004's "A Spectacle of Corruption."
Last week, Ballantine published Liss' first contemporary thriller, "The Ethical Assassin." The year is 1985; the place, Jacksonville, Fla. Wang Chung is on the radio and "Miami Vice" is the show of the moment. Lemuel Altick is a 17-year-old who — you guessed it — sells encyclopedias door-to-door to raise money so he can attend Columbia. He's working a trailer park when two of his customers are killed by an erudite hipster assassin. Soon, the killer has recruited Lem to help him undermine the operations at a local hog farm, which is a front for police and political corruption.
Liss has always woven big ideas into his books and this one is no different. In addition to serving up a twisty mystery, he offers disquisitions on Marxism, food politics and the morality of murder.
We spoke to him by phone from his home in San Antonio, where he moved in 2001 to follow his wife, an English professor at Trinity University.
Austin American-Statesman: Was writing a contemporary novel easier than writing a historical novel?
David Liss: Since I could draw on my own memories of what it was like to be alive in 1985, there wasn't as much research to do. One of the things I worked on in my historical novels was figuring out how people thought in the past. Human subjectivity was different in the 17th and 18th centuries, but I know what things are like today, minus a couple of decades.
Does the book draw on your own experiences selling encyclopedias door-to-door?
Yes, minus the drugs and murder. The world of door-to-door sales is pretty much dead, but it is a part of American history. I thought for years that encyclopedia sales would be a great setting for a book. The period in which I set the book was pretty much the last moment in which it was common. A rising sense of vulnerability and the Internet have conspired to do away with it. I say that somewhat wistfully. It was something unique and bizarre.
The character of the assassin is an animal rights activist who makes a strong argument for the ethical treatment of animals. Did you set out to make the book so polemical?
I wanted to write a book that would make people think about animal rights. It's not possible to convert many people to your view in a novel, especially if it's a polemic. The reader will feel preached to and you won't feel happy. So I had to put the animal rights position in the mouth of an iffy character, a charismatic wacko. It's difficult to take him on face value. His existence challenges norms.
For the record, where do you stand on this issue?
People who eat meat should be set on fire. No, I'm not serious. I do think the animal rights movement is correct and the treatment of animals is a major problem. I feel we have certain assumed ideas or behaviors that we've allowed to go unquestioned, especially in commercial industries for food or the testing of products. I feel that all the assumptions should be questioned.
Do you worry about the reaction of meat-eating readers?
My experience with making public statements about animal rights has been limited, but unpleasant. Starbucks had a program where they recruited celebrities, writers, musicians to put quotes on their cups. The quote I used was an animal rights quote. I got a lot of hate mail from it and not the "I disagree with your point of view" kind of hate mail either.
Austinites can be a bit smug about our literary culture. How about San Antonio?
For a town to be literary you need a critical mass for writers and readers. A friend of mine pointed out recently that San Antonio has more professional basketball players than writers. Not being around a lot of other writers isn't a problem for my creativity, but it is nice to be around people who understand what you do.
By Edward Nawotka
David Liss got his first taste of the book business as a teenage door-to-door encyclopedia salesman in Florida. Flogging high-priced knowledge, apparently, was the perfect starter job for a would-be professor: After attending Syracuse for his bachelor's degree and Georgia State for his master's , Liss enrolled in a doctoral program at Columbia, where he worked on a thesis about how, in his words, "the mid-18th-century novel reflects and shapes the emergence of the modern idea of personal finance."
He abandoned the thesis after writing his first novel, "A Conspiracy of Paper," a brainy thriller about Benjamin Weaver, a freelance debt collector who investigates the death of his father amid financial foment in early 18th-century London. It won a 2001 Edgar Award for best first mystery novel by an American writer and was followed by another historical thriller, 2003's "The Coffee Trader," and a sequel, 2004's "A Spectacle of Corruption."
Last week, Ballantine published Liss' first contemporary thriller, "The Ethical Assassin." The year is 1985; the place, Jacksonville, Fla. Wang Chung is on the radio and "Miami Vice" is the show of the moment. Lemuel Altick is a 17-year-old who — you guessed it — sells encyclopedias door-to-door to raise money so he can attend Columbia. He's working a trailer park when two of his customers are killed by an erudite hipster assassin. Soon, the killer has recruited Lem to help him undermine the operations at a local hog farm, which is a front for police and political corruption.
Liss has always woven big ideas into his books and this one is no different. In addition to serving up a twisty mystery, he offers disquisitions on Marxism, food politics and the morality of murder.
We spoke to him by phone from his home in San Antonio, where he moved in 2001 to follow his wife, an English professor at Trinity University.
Austin American-Statesman: Was writing a contemporary novel easier than writing a historical novel?
David Liss: Since I could draw on my own memories of what it was like to be alive in 1985, there wasn't as much research to do. One of the things I worked on in my historical novels was figuring out how people thought in the past. Human subjectivity was different in the 17th and 18th centuries, but I know what things are like today, minus a couple of decades.
Does the book draw on your own experiences selling encyclopedias door-to-door?
Yes, minus the drugs and murder. The world of door-to-door sales is pretty much dead, but it is a part of American history. I thought for years that encyclopedia sales would be a great setting for a book. The period in which I set the book was pretty much the last moment in which it was common. A rising sense of vulnerability and the Internet have conspired to do away with it. I say that somewhat wistfully. It was something unique and bizarre.
The character of the assassin is an animal rights activist who makes a strong argument for the ethical treatment of animals. Did you set out to make the book so polemical?
I wanted to write a book that would make people think about animal rights. It's not possible to convert many people to your view in a novel, especially if it's a polemic. The reader will feel preached to and you won't feel happy. So I had to put the animal rights position in the mouth of an iffy character, a charismatic wacko. It's difficult to take him on face value. His existence challenges norms.
For the record, where do you stand on this issue?
People who eat meat should be set on fire. No, I'm not serious. I do think the animal rights movement is correct and the treatment of animals is a major problem. I feel we have certain assumed ideas or behaviors that we've allowed to go unquestioned, especially in commercial industries for food or the testing of products. I feel that all the assumptions should be questioned.
Do you worry about the reaction of meat-eating readers?
My experience with making public statements about animal rights has been limited, but unpleasant. Starbucks had a program where they recruited celebrities, writers, musicians to put quotes on their cups. The quote I used was an animal rights quote. I got a lot of hate mail from it and not the "I disagree with your point of view" kind of hate mail either.
Austinites can be a bit smug about our literary culture. How about San Antonio?
For a town to be literary you need a critical mass for writers and readers. A friend of mine pointed out recently that San Antonio has more professional basketball players than writers. Not being around a lot of other writers isn't a problem for my creativity, but it is nice to be around people who understand what you do.
What becomes of the broken hearted?: Honeymoon with My Brother by Franz Wisner
What becomes of the broken hearted?
When love goes south, two brothers hop on a plane and head east (and west and north and south).
By Edward Nawotka
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Sunday, March 05, 2006
In 2000, Franz "Wiz" Wisner was sitting on a rooftop of an Istanbul, Turkey, hotel when he thought, "Time to think. This is the greatest luxury of travel. Hard-core, maharishi-meditating, clear-all-the-cobwebs-away thinking. One thought, one subject. An idea, an emotion. Pry deeper and deeper and — lo and behold — sometimes find something there."
Fair enough. So what does Wisner, a successful 36-year-old red-blooded American male, think about while in Turkey?
Women? Food?
No. Bob Dole at the Republican National Convention in San Diego in 1996.
Sure, it might not be the first thing to pop into your mind while on vacation, but Wisner was unwinding after a stressful career as a press aide for Sen. and Gov. Pete Wilson of California and as a lobbyist for the Irvine Group, a posh real estate developer.
So what was Wiz doing in Istanbul other than dreaming of Bob Dole? Spying for the Bush administration?
No. He was mending his broken heart.
In his unexpectedly entertaining book, "Honeymoon with My Brother," Wisner explains how he was dumped by his on-again, off-again fiancée five days before his lavish storybook wedding.
Instead of sending his far-flung friends and family back home, Wisner threw a party anyway, sans bride, and then persuaded his recently divorced younger brother, Kurt, to join him on his prepaid honeymoon to Costa Rica.
There, they discover that they're more than just siblings — they're compatible travel mates — and Franz soon persuades Kurt to join him on a two-year trek around the world.
To pay for the trip, they sell off their belongings — cars, houses, even Kurt's giant-sized wedding photo (Price: $1. They joke that Kurt's ex-wife will get half). They travel to Europe and buy a Saab in Sweden to travel through Germany, Italy, Greece and Turkey. In a move that was bold even in a pre-9/11 world, they persuade a border guard to let them cross into Syria by brandishing a fundraising photo of Franz posing with George W. Bush.
After a quick return trip to California to recharge, they head to Asia. It's on a remote island off the coast of Bali that they discard their middle-class mores and fully embrace the backpacker persona, opting to sleep in cheapo beach shacks rather than in comfortable hotels.
Overall, their trip took them to 53 countries throughout Europe, Asia, South America and southern Africa.
Unlike travel books that strive to reveal the secrets of obscure, out-of-the-way places, the account of this thirty-something globetrotting duo mostly hits spots that are familiar from Sunday travel supplements, such as Prague and Bangkok. That's not to say the Wisner brothers don't also fall off the beaten path often enough to keep things interesting. But the focus is less on sightseeing than it is on their evolving relationship.
Throughout the book are letters Franz wrote to his 98-year-old step-grandmother, LaRue, who has tacked up a world map in her nursing home on which she tracks their travels. She, unlike the Wisners' parents, encourages them to keep moving, reminding them that life is short and they'll never regret their adventure. The Wisners' honeymoon ends when the brothers return from a five-month stint in Africa to attend her 100th birthday party.
The Wisners' travelogue might remind you of the movie "Sideways," with its male heartache, bonding over booze, frolicsome skirt-chasing and introspective epiphanies at scenic overlooks. There's even a moment much like the one where Paul Giamatti's character, Miles, rants about how he won't be drinking any merlot: After finding a Vietnamese café recommended by the Lonely Planet guide filled exclusively with other Lonely Planet-toting tourists, Franz Wisner tosses his guidebook into the garbage. He fumes, "(Enough with) that thing. I'm sick of the cult of the Lonely Planet. And I'm sick of hanging out with Lonely Planet groupies. Plus, how can this planet ever be lonely if we all congregate in the same cafes and youth hostels sipping our teas and patting each other on the back for avoiding tourist traps?"
In spite of occasional frustrations with guide books, larcenous taxi drivers and belligerent border guards, Franz Wisner remains such an upbeat advocate of travel as a transformative experience that he'll have you logging on to Expedia.com long before you finish the book.
P.S. It has all ended well for Franz. Not only has "Honeymoon with My Brother" been optioned by Hollywood, giving him a welcome financial windfall, but he found a new love, the actress Tracy Middendorf. They married in January 2005, though, according to Wisner, they have yet to take a honeymoon.
Kurt, 38, is single and still available.
Austin writer Ed Nawotka contributed the books section to Lonely Planet USA and recommends using any guidebook responsibly and in moderation.
When love goes south, two brothers hop on a plane and head east (and west and north and south).
By Edward Nawotka
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Sunday, March 05, 2006
In 2000, Franz "Wiz" Wisner was sitting on a rooftop of an Istanbul, Turkey, hotel when he thought, "Time to think. This is the greatest luxury of travel. Hard-core, maharishi-meditating, clear-all-the-cobwebs-away thinking. One thought, one subject. An idea, an emotion. Pry deeper and deeper and — lo and behold — sometimes find something there."
Fair enough. So what does Wisner, a successful 36-year-old red-blooded American male, think about while in Turkey?
Women? Food?
No. Bob Dole at the Republican National Convention in San Diego in 1996.
Sure, it might not be the first thing to pop into your mind while on vacation, but Wisner was unwinding after a stressful career as a press aide for Sen. and Gov. Pete Wilson of California and as a lobbyist for the Irvine Group, a posh real estate developer.
So what was Wiz doing in Istanbul other than dreaming of Bob Dole? Spying for the Bush administration?
No. He was mending his broken heart.
In his unexpectedly entertaining book, "Honeymoon with My Brother," Wisner explains how he was dumped by his on-again, off-again fiancée five days before his lavish storybook wedding.
Instead of sending his far-flung friends and family back home, Wisner threw a party anyway, sans bride, and then persuaded his recently divorced younger brother, Kurt, to join him on his prepaid honeymoon to Costa Rica.
There, they discover that they're more than just siblings — they're compatible travel mates — and Franz soon persuades Kurt to join him on a two-year trek around the world.
To pay for the trip, they sell off their belongings — cars, houses, even Kurt's giant-sized wedding photo (Price: $1. They joke that Kurt's ex-wife will get half). They travel to Europe and buy a Saab in Sweden to travel through Germany, Italy, Greece and Turkey. In a move that was bold even in a pre-9/11 world, they persuade a border guard to let them cross into Syria by brandishing a fundraising photo of Franz posing with George W. Bush.
After a quick return trip to California to recharge, they head to Asia. It's on a remote island off the coast of Bali that they discard their middle-class mores and fully embrace the backpacker persona, opting to sleep in cheapo beach shacks rather than in comfortable hotels.
Overall, their trip took them to 53 countries throughout Europe, Asia, South America and southern Africa.
Unlike travel books that strive to reveal the secrets of obscure, out-of-the-way places, the account of this thirty-something globetrotting duo mostly hits spots that are familiar from Sunday travel supplements, such as Prague and Bangkok. That's not to say the Wisner brothers don't also fall off the beaten path often enough to keep things interesting. But the focus is less on sightseeing than it is on their evolving relationship.
Throughout the book are letters Franz wrote to his 98-year-old step-grandmother, LaRue, who has tacked up a world map in her nursing home on which she tracks their travels. She, unlike the Wisners' parents, encourages them to keep moving, reminding them that life is short and they'll never regret their adventure. The Wisners' honeymoon ends when the brothers return from a five-month stint in Africa to attend her 100th birthday party.
The Wisners' travelogue might remind you of the movie "Sideways," with its male heartache, bonding over booze, frolicsome skirt-chasing and introspective epiphanies at scenic overlooks. There's even a moment much like the one where Paul Giamatti's character, Miles, rants about how he won't be drinking any merlot: After finding a Vietnamese café recommended by the Lonely Planet guide filled exclusively with other Lonely Planet-toting tourists, Franz Wisner tosses his guidebook into the garbage. He fumes, "(Enough with) that thing. I'm sick of the cult of the Lonely Planet. And I'm sick of hanging out with Lonely Planet groupies. Plus, how can this planet ever be lonely if we all congregate in the same cafes and youth hostels sipping our teas and patting each other on the back for avoiding tourist traps?"
In spite of occasional frustrations with guide books, larcenous taxi drivers and belligerent border guards, Franz Wisner remains such an upbeat advocate of travel as a transformative experience that he'll have you logging on to Expedia.com long before you finish the book.
P.S. It has all ended well for Franz. Not only has "Honeymoon with My Brother" been optioned by Hollywood, giving him a welcome financial windfall, but he found a new love, the actress Tracy Middendorf. They married in January 2005, though, according to Wisner, they have yet to take a honeymoon.
Kurt, 38, is single and still available.
Austin writer Ed Nawotka contributed the books section to Lonely Planet USA and recommends using any guidebook responsibly and in moderation.
Monday, February 20, 2006
Review: Gail Caldwell's A Strong West Wind
Out of the Panhandle . . . and into the fire
Book critic Gail Caldwell describes her move from idyllic Amarillo to the white-hot cultural ferment of 1970s Austin.
By Edward Nawotka
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Sunday, February 19, 2006
In 1973, when Gail Caldwell was 22, she and her friends hatched a plan to kidnap the feminist author Gloria Steinem. The occasion was the National Women's Political Convention in Houston, and Caldwell's all-girl honky-tonk band, the Soeur Queens, had driven in from Austin to play the gig. Fortunately, the plot was short-lived. Still, Caldwell writes in her memoir "A Strong West Wind," "a few of us did go so far as to join Steinem in an elevator and serenade her with 'Glo-o-o-o-o-o-o-r-r-ia, in excelsis deo.' "
It was just the kind of madcap plan a college drop-out living in Austin and casting about for direction would concoct in the '70s. Caldwell wasn't just a musician — she was an anti-Vietnam War protester, a cashier at Grok Books (which eventually morphed into Book People) and a paralegal for a lawyer more fond of drinking at Scholz Garten than preparing for court. She served as confessor to "Gay Place" author Billy Lee Brammer and peer-counselor to the distressed at Womenspace. "Austin in those days," she writes, "had the casual habit of setting itself on fire."
That was Gail Caldwell then. Today, she's the chief book critic at the Boston Globe, where she won a Pulitzer Prize in 2001. Her tough-minded opinions helped shape my ideas of what constituted a good book and offered a thoughtful counterpoint to the diet of academic theory I was fed as an undergraduate at Boston College. For that, I will always be grateful. My mother, on the other hand, can't stand her reviews, which she finds far too grumpy.
So how has Caldwell done in her first foray into book-length writing? Wonderfully. Texans — especially Austinites — will likely regard "A Strong West Wind" as an instant classic of the state's literature.
Born in Amarillo in 1951, Caldwell was "a shy girl in glasses in a do-nothing town" who limped from polio. After her sister taught her to read at age 4, she sought refuge in the library, "where you could lose yourself for hours in sanctioned daydreams." This is a typical creation myth for a writer, but Caldwell invests it with genuine poetry. When she discovers the meaning of the word "the," she imagines it as a "fencepost along the road of text, connecting the stories that seemed to go on as far as, and even beyond, the north Texas plains."
Unlike many memoirists, Caldwell describes a relatively uneventful and happy childhood. "My pleasures remained pensive or interior," she writes, "fishing with my dad, climbing trees with my sister to our fort (in actuality, a neighbor's forbidden flat-topped garage roof), where we read and ate pimiento-cheese or butter-and-sugar sandwiches."
The tempests of adolescence brought this idyll to an end, prompting Caldwell to revolt against the Panhandle's conservative values. She protested the Vietnam War, creating a wedge between her and her father, a World War II veteran nicknamed Wild Bill. She dated an ex-University of Texas quarterback who dropped acid and lost his scholarship. She traded in her George Jones records for Joe Cocker albums.
Caldwell enrolled at nearby Texas Tech University in Lubbock, but she was so confused about her ambitions that she declared seven majors in seven semesters — before getting arrested for marijuana possession. And so she moved to a part of Texas where such behavior might be indulged. "However much the notion might have horrified my preacher ancestors," she writes, "Austin was to be my city on a hill: the little utopia where my best self might emerge."
She made the move in 1970. By 1981, aged 30, she was looking at Austin through the rearview mirror of an old Volvo, "leaving behind a decade of idealism and excess — and a city whose casualties of history had convinced me not to be one of them." The intervening years had been filled with radicalism, consciousness-raising and, eventually, undergraduate and graduate work at UT.
Chapters describing academic studies might sound like a sure-fire interruption of what Caldwell calls the "temporary fugue state that every reader knows." But Caldwell manages to convey the excitement she felt during watershed moments in her intellectual awakening. She writes of an American studies professor whose handwritten comments on her papers "coax(ed) me into the light like some feral creature in the woods." Other professors, such as the one rumored to open a doctoral orals exam with the question, "Why is 'Jaws' a better book than 'Moby-Dick?' Defend," were the sort of people who "lived for the scent of graduate student fear."
Though Caldwell dropped out before taking her oral exams, she managed to get a master's degree in 1980 and in 2002 was named an outstanding alumna of the university.
"A Strong West Wind" doesn't venture far into Caldwell's post-collegiate life — perhaps that's grist for a second volume. Instead, she recalls the yearning that Amarillo evokes in her: "My sister drew and sketched her horses, my mother fussed over her roses in the barren Texas soil, my father drove around town on Sundays at twenty miles an hour, his left arm hanging out the window. These were the activities not just of semi-small-town innocence, but of another age, when daydreaming was a necessary and legitimate activity."
The second half of the book is mostly a paean to the enduring love among the members of her family, especially the women in her life — her sister, mother and Aunt Connie who suffered from depression and was married three times, an archetype who gave Caldwell a "weakness for dogs, novels and bourbon." The details in these final pages are a bit more diffuse than the harder edged early chapters, but they're no less heartfelt.
The white-hot core of this book is the political and social upheaval that Caldwell experienced during her years in Austin. These chapters, as intense as the early autobiographical essays of Joan Didion, are notable for their clear-eyed perspective and a distinct lack of nostalgia for the hippies and hijinks that Caldwell — and Austin — have clearly outgrown.
Book critic Gail Caldwell describes her move from idyllic Amarillo to the white-hot cultural ferment of 1970s Austin.
By Edward Nawotka
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Sunday, February 19, 2006
In 1973, when Gail Caldwell was 22, she and her friends hatched a plan to kidnap the feminist author Gloria Steinem. The occasion was the National Women's Political Convention in Houston, and Caldwell's all-girl honky-tonk band, the Soeur Queens, had driven in from Austin to play the gig. Fortunately, the plot was short-lived. Still, Caldwell writes in her memoir "A Strong West Wind," "a few of us did go so far as to join Steinem in an elevator and serenade her with 'Glo-o-o-o-o-o-o-r-r-ia, in excelsis deo.' "
It was just the kind of madcap plan a college drop-out living in Austin and casting about for direction would concoct in the '70s. Caldwell wasn't just a musician — she was an anti-Vietnam War protester, a cashier at Grok Books (which eventually morphed into Book People) and a paralegal for a lawyer more fond of drinking at Scholz Garten than preparing for court. She served as confessor to "Gay Place" author Billy Lee Brammer and peer-counselor to the distressed at Womenspace. "Austin in those days," she writes, "had the casual habit of setting itself on fire."
That was Gail Caldwell then. Today, she's the chief book critic at the Boston Globe, where she won a Pulitzer Prize in 2001. Her tough-minded opinions helped shape my ideas of what constituted a good book and offered a thoughtful counterpoint to the diet of academic theory I was fed as an undergraduate at Boston College. For that, I will always be grateful. My mother, on the other hand, can't stand her reviews, which she finds far too grumpy.
So how has Caldwell done in her first foray into book-length writing? Wonderfully. Texans — especially Austinites — will likely regard "A Strong West Wind" as an instant classic of the state's literature.
Born in Amarillo in 1951, Caldwell was "a shy girl in glasses in a do-nothing town" who limped from polio. After her sister taught her to read at age 4, she sought refuge in the library, "where you could lose yourself for hours in sanctioned daydreams." This is a typical creation myth for a writer, but Caldwell invests it with genuine poetry. When she discovers the meaning of the word "the," she imagines it as a "fencepost along the road of text, connecting the stories that seemed to go on as far as, and even beyond, the north Texas plains."
Unlike many memoirists, Caldwell describes a relatively uneventful and happy childhood. "My pleasures remained pensive or interior," she writes, "fishing with my dad, climbing trees with my sister to our fort (in actuality, a neighbor's forbidden flat-topped garage roof), where we read and ate pimiento-cheese or butter-and-sugar sandwiches."
The tempests of adolescence brought this idyll to an end, prompting Caldwell to revolt against the Panhandle's conservative values. She protested the Vietnam War, creating a wedge between her and her father, a World War II veteran nicknamed Wild Bill. She dated an ex-University of Texas quarterback who dropped acid and lost his scholarship. She traded in her George Jones records for Joe Cocker albums.
Caldwell enrolled at nearby Texas Tech University in Lubbock, but she was so confused about her ambitions that she declared seven majors in seven semesters — before getting arrested for marijuana possession. And so she moved to a part of Texas where such behavior might be indulged. "However much the notion might have horrified my preacher ancestors," she writes, "Austin was to be my city on a hill: the little utopia where my best self might emerge."
She made the move in 1970. By 1981, aged 30, she was looking at Austin through the rearview mirror of an old Volvo, "leaving behind a decade of idealism and excess — and a city whose casualties of history had convinced me not to be one of them." The intervening years had been filled with radicalism, consciousness-raising and, eventually, undergraduate and graduate work at UT.
Chapters describing academic studies might sound like a sure-fire interruption of what Caldwell calls the "temporary fugue state that every reader knows." But Caldwell manages to convey the excitement she felt during watershed moments in her intellectual awakening. She writes of an American studies professor whose handwritten comments on her papers "coax(ed) me into the light like some feral creature in the woods." Other professors, such as the one rumored to open a doctoral orals exam with the question, "Why is 'Jaws' a better book than 'Moby-Dick?' Defend," were the sort of people who "lived for the scent of graduate student fear."
Though Caldwell dropped out before taking her oral exams, she managed to get a master's degree in 1980 and in 2002 was named an outstanding alumna of the university.
"A Strong West Wind" doesn't venture far into Caldwell's post-collegiate life — perhaps that's grist for a second volume. Instead, she recalls the yearning that Amarillo evokes in her: "My sister drew and sketched her horses, my mother fussed over her roses in the barren Texas soil, my father drove around town on Sundays at twenty miles an hour, his left arm hanging out the window. These were the activities not just of semi-small-town innocence, but of another age, when daydreaming was a necessary and legitimate activity."
The second half of the book is mostly a paean to the enduring love among the members of her family, especially the women in her life — her sister, mother and Aunt Connie who suffered from depression and was married three times, an archetype who gave Caldwell a "weakness for dogs, novels and bourbon." The details in these final pages are a bit more diffuse than the harder edged early chapters, but they're no less heartfelt.
The white-hot core of this book is the political and social upheaval that Caldwell experienced during her years in Austin. These chapters, as intense as the early autobiographical essays of Joan Didion, are notable for their clear-eyed perspective and a distinct lack of nostalgia for the hippies and hijinks that Caldwell — and Austin — have clearly outgrown.
Wednesday, February 08, 2006
Q&A with Ana Marie Cox, aka Wonkette, on "Dog Days"
Ana Marie Cox is known to most by her online moniker “Wonkette.” As editor and principal writer of “Wonkette.com,” a scabrous two-year-old Washington D.C. blog about misbehavior amongst our elected officials, Cox has become one of the queens of the blogosphere.
But at the ripe age of 33, Cox is leaving the blog behind to focus on writing books, and adopting the mantle of “Wonkette Emeritus.”
A photogenic strawberry blond, Cox has become well known for her looks and the smattering of star-spangled tattoos on her right arm--usually prominent in her publicity snaps—as her trenchant observations about Beltway society.
She is touring the country to promote her first novel “Dog Days” (Riverhead Books, 274 pages, $23.95), a political satire about a Democratic presidential campaign run amok. Cox spoke with Edward Nawotka by phone while in-between tour stops in California.
Nawotka: How do you succinctly describe your novel to people who haven’t read it yet?
Cox: It is a fantasia of the Kerry campaign and takes a fun house mirror view of the last election and looks at it through the eyes of a young communications worker. Two aspects of her life begin to be threatened: She has an affair with a married man and her candidate is attacked by a Swift-boat style campaign. So she and her friend come up with a “Wag the Dog”-type distraction. Chaos and hilarity ensue.
Nawotka: Since you’ve been on book tour, have people been more interested in asking about the blog or the novel?
Cox: I’ve been lucky and most people have been genuinely interested in the book. Questions have ranged from my favorite brand of gin to “When do you think America might lose its foreign policy dominance?”
Nawotka: Gin? That’s not the type of question that Paul Bremer is getting on his tour.
Cox: Bremer is definitely getting the question about foreign policy. But I also write a lot about drinking. Because I did a blog for so long people seem to think that I know something about politics.
Nawotka: Were you able to do things with your characters that you hoped people in real life would do?
Cox: They definitely had better conversations. They’re wittier. But they have just as dirty lines. There’s a lot of ham-fisted flirting that happens, which I think is an accurate reflection of Washington.
Nawotka: You’ve said that D.C. is “the only city in America run by nerds.” But Silicon Valley is also full of nerds, and you don’t get the sense the people out there are having a lot of sex.
Cox: I don’t think people there have the same fate-of-the-free-world sense of purpose. That can be a real aphrodisiac.
Nawotka: You also write that Washington D.C. is a lot like high school. How so?
Cox: Well, it’s very cliquish and status oriented. People are really insecure and ambitious. Who you have lunch with matters, a lot. There is a prom, which is the White House Correspondent’s Dinner. Finally, there is no such thing as having a separate life from Washington. It’s all consuming in the same way life was in high school, when everything matters so much all the time.
Nawotka: Do you have the same kind of break downs that you had in the movie “The Breakfast Club,” with the jocks, brainiacs…
Cox: There are not the jocks, but I think there are probably nerds of the nerds. But I haven’t met them. There are very deep in the bowels of some think tank somewhere.
Nawotka: If you could go back and spend any time with any politician from the last 100 years, who would it be?
Cox: Lyndon Johnson. He was a heck of a guy who was willing to cut a lot of corners to accomplish something he thought was ultimately a moral good. He was also a big fan of bourbon, as am I.
Nawotka: Any particular brand?
Cox: Maker’s Mark is my default choice.
Nawotka: Now that you’re Wonkette Emeritus, what’s next?
Cox: I’m writing an anthropological study of young conservatives. It’s a culture I don’t understand and is very important in this country. I plan on studying it without bringing a whole lot of judgment to it. Although, I plan to mock for mocking’s sake.
But at the ripe age of 33, Cox is leaving the blog behind to focus on writing books, and adopting the mantle of “Wonkette Emeritus.”
A photogenic strawberry blond, Cox has become well known for her looks and the smattering of star-spangled tattoos on her right arm--usually prominent in her publicity snaps—as her trenchant observations about Beltway society.
She is touring the country to promote her first novel “Dog Days” (Riverhead Books, 274 pages, $23.95), a political satire about a Democratic presidential campaign run amok. Cox spoke with Edward Nawotka by phone while in-between tour stops in California.
Nawotka: How do you succinctly describe your novel to people who haven’t read it yet?
Cox: It is a fantasia of the Kerry campaign and takes a fun house mirror view of the last election and looks at it through the eyes of a young communications worker. Two aspects of her life begin to be threatened: She has an affair with a married man and her candidate is attacked by a Swift-boat style campaign. So she and her friend come up with a “Wag the Dog”-type distraction. Chaos and hilarity ensue.
Nawotka: Since you’ve been on book tour, have people been more interested in asking about the blog or the novel?
Cox: I’ve been lucky and most people have been genuinely interested in the book. Questions have ranged from my favorite brand of gin to “When do you think America might lose its foreign policy dominance?”
Nawotka: Gin? That’s not the type of question that Paul Bremer is getting on his tour.
Cox: Bremer is definitely getting the question about foreign policy. But I also write a lot about drinking. Because I did a blog for so long people seem to think that I know something about politics.
Nawotka: Were you able to do things with your characters that you hoped people in real life would do?
Cox: They definitely had better conversations. They’re wittier. But they have just as dirty lines. There’s a lot of ham-fisted flirting that happens, which I think is an accurate reflection of Washington.
Nawotka: You’ve said that D.C. is “the only city in America run by nerds.” But Silicon Valley is also full of nerds, and you don’t get the sense the people out there are having a lot of sex.
Cox: I don’t think people there have the same fate-of-the-free-world sense of purpose. That can be a real aphrodisiac.
Nawotka: You also write that Washington D.C. is a lot like high school. How so?
Cox: Well, it’s very cliquish and status oriented. People are really insecure and ambitious. Who you have lunch with matters, a lot. There is a prom, which is the White House Correspondent’s Dinner. Finally, there is no such thing as having a separate life from Washington. It’s all consuming in the same way life was in high school, when everything matters so much all the time.
Nawotka: Do you have the same kind of break downs that you had in the movie “The Breakfast Club,” with the jocks, brainiacs…
Cox: There are not the jocks, but I think there are probably nerds of the nerds. But I haven’t met them. There are very deep in the bowels of some think tank somewhere.
Nawotka: If you could go back and spend any time with any politician from the last 100 years, who would it be?
Cox: Lyndon Johnson. He was a heck of a guy who was willing to cut a lot of corners to accomplish something he thought was ultimately a moral good. He was also a big fan of bourbon, as am I.
Nawotka: Any particular brand?
Cox: Maker’s Mark is my default choice.
Nawotka: Now that you’re Wonkette Emeritus, what’s next?
Cox: I’m writing an anthropological study of young conservatives. It’s a culture I don’t understand and is very important in this country. I plan on studying it without bringing a whole lot of judgment to it. Although, I plan to mock for mocking’s sake.
Spying on Americans, Ruling Iraq: Books by Risen, Bremer, Envoy
Spying on Americans, Ruling Iraq: Books by Risen, Bremer, Envoy
By Edward Nawotka
Jan. 20 -- In the 1998 movie ``Enemy of the
State,'' Will Smith portrays a Washington lawyer eluding goons
from the U.S. National Security Agency. In scene after scene,
NSA high-tech wizardry tracks the attorney, keeping him under
surveillance and on the run.
What seemed like a paranoid Hollywood fantasy at the time
has come much closer to reality since the terrorist attacks of
Sept. 11, 2001, writes James Risen in ``State of War: The Secret
History of the CIA and the Bush Administration'' (Free Press,
240 pages, $26).
Risen is the New York Times reporter who disclosed in
December that U.S. President George W. Bush had authorized the
NSA to eavesdrop on the international phone calls and e-mail
messages of American citizens and foreign nationals. The purpose
of that spying was to search for what Risen calls the
``potential evidence of terrorist activity without search
warrants or any new laws that would permit such domestic
intelligence collection.''
The NSA report forms just one chapter in Risen's book,
which discusses half a dozen episodes of alleged intelligence
blunders and deceptions going back to the administration of
President Bill Clinton. Risen's main focus is the Central
Intelligence Agency, which he dubs ``the government's equivalent
of Enron.'' Highlights include a CIA operation in 2000 that
Risen says slipped blueprints for a nuclear weapon to Iran.
`Critical Precedent'
In places, Risen makes alarming suppositions. He quotes an
unidentified source, for example, who says Bush asked then CIA
director George Tenet why an imprisoned al Qaeda member, Abu
Zubaydah, had received pain medication. Then Risen asserts:
``In many ways, the Abu Zubaydah case was the critical
precedent for the future handling of prisoners both in the
global war on terrorism and in the war in Iraq.''
(Tenet will this year publish his own memoir, tentatively
titled ``At the Center of the Storm,'' according to a statement
from his publisher, HarperCollins.)
Risen also asserts that Bush allowed Vice President Dick
Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to create an
atmosphere of intimidation that prevented U.S. generals from
requesting more troops in Iraq.
`My Year in Iraq'
One man who says he wasn't cowed by the likes of Cheney and
Rumsfeld is L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator of Iraq
following the fall of Saddam Hussein in April 2003.
Before heading to Iraq, Bremer sat down to lunch with Bush
to make it clear that he was ``the president's man,'' not a
servant of Rumsfeld or former Secretary of State Colin Powell,
he writes in his memoir, ``My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to
Build a Future of Hope'' (Simon & Schuster, 417 pages, $27).
Bremer's book describes his work at the Coalition
Provisional Authority from May 2003 until sovereignty passed to
the Iraqis in June 2004. Written almost like a diary, the memoir
shows how Bremer collaborated with the U.S. military, the United
Nations mission and various Iraqi factions to fill ``the chaotic
power vacuum'' with something resembling law and order.
On his arrival in Baghdad, Bremer says he felt as if he had
landed in ``a postapocalypse Los Angeles.'' His headquarters in
one of Hussein's former palaces smelled of ``diesel exhaust and
overloaded portable toilets.'' He ditched his dress shoes for a
pair of Timberland boots, which he wore with blue suits.
`Revolt on the Tigris'
The book unfortunately bogs down in blow-by-blow accounts
of diplomatic exchanges and bureaucratic maneuvering. Bremer's
days are long, hot and frustrating. While Bremer supported the war, he is concerned about being abandoned to become a fall guy for controversial decisions, such as his disbanding of the Iraqi army, an order he says came down through the political chain of command.
In the end Bremer, who survived numerous assassination attempts and had a bounty of 10,000 grams of gold on his head offered by Osama bin Laden, expresses little regret about the job, only wishing he’d done more to bolster the economy by limiting subsidies and improving overall security. Though short on startling disclosures, ``My Year in Iraq'' will be essential primary reading for future historians.
A more absorbing account of the occupation comes from Mark
Etherington, a U.K. diplomat who acted as governor of southern
Iraq's volatile Wasit province from October 2003 to May 2004. He
describes this stint in ``Revolt on the Tigris: The Al-Sadr
Uprising and the Governing of Iraq'' (Cornell, 252 pages, $25;
published in the U.K. by C. Hurst, 15 pounds).
Garrisoned in the town of Kut, Etherington and his U.S.
deputy, Timm Timmons, were charged with administering a
region that included about 1 million people and a stretch of
border with Iran running 145 kilometers (90 miles) long. The
group was initially protected by a modest contingent of
Ukrainian soldiers and later by an Abrams tank nicknamed ``Be
Sensitive.''
Wasit province was home to Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr,
who was fomenting a rebellion. The diplomat's limited defenses
proved inadequate when the cleric's Mehdi army attacked in April
2004, temporarily forcing him to flee the region.
Etherington displays the expected stiff upper lip under
pressure, yet manages to communicate the pathos of daily
civilian life in Iraq. Just before leaving al-Kut, Timmons says
something that sums up the whole occupation of Iraq:
``You know -- it just could have been done a lot better.''
By Edward Nawotka
Jan. 20 -- In the 1998 movie ``Enemy of the
State,'' Will Smith portrays a Washington lawyer eluding goons
from the U.S. National Security Agency. In scene after scene,
NSA high-tech wizardry tracks the attorney, keeping him under
surveillance and on the run.
What seemed like a paranoid Hollywood fantasy at the time
has come much closer to reality since the terrorist attacks of
Sept. 11, 2001, writes James Risen in ``State of War: The Secret
History of the CIA and the Bush Administration'' (Free Press,
240 pages, $26).
Risen is the New York Times reporter who disclosed in
December that U.S. President George W. Bush had authorized the
NSA to eavesdrop on the international phone calls and e-mail
messages of American citizens and foreign nationals. The purpose
of that spying was to search for what Risen calls the
``potential evidence of terrorist activity without search
warrants or any new laws that would permit such domestic
intelligence collection.''
The NSA report forms just one chapter in Risen's book,
which discusses half a dozen episodes of alleged intelligence
blunders and deceptions going back to the administration of
President Bill Clinton. Risen's main focus is the Central
Intelligence Agency, which he dubs ``the government's equivalent
of Enron.'' Highlights include a CIA operation in 2000 that
Risen says slipped blueprints for a nuclear weapon to Iran.
`Critical Precedent'
In places, Risen makes alarming suppositions. He quotes an
unidentified source, for example, who says Bush asked then CIA
director George Tenet why an imprisoned al Qaeda member, Abu
Zubaydah, had received pain medication. Then Risen asserts:
``In many ways, the Abu Zubaydah case was the critical
precedent for the future handling of prisoners both in the
global war on terrorism and in the war in Iraq.''
(Tenet will this year publish his own memoir, tentatively
titled ``At the Center of the Storm,'' according to a statement
from his publisher, HarperCollins.)
Risen also asserts that Bush allowed Vice President Dick
Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to create an
atmosphere of intimidation that prevented U.S. generals from
requesting more troops in Iraq.
`My Year in Iraq'
One man who says he wasn't cowed by the likes of Cheney and
Rumsfeld is L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator of Iraq
following the fall of Saddam Hussein in April 2003.
Before heading to Iraq, Bremer sat down to lunch with Bush
to make it clear that he was ``the president's man,'' not a
servant of Rumsfeld or former Secretary of State Colin Powell,
he writes in his memoir, ``My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to
Build a Future of Hope'' (Simon & Schuster, 417 pages, $27).
Bremer's book describes his work at the Coalition
Provisional Authority from May 2003 until sovereignty passed to
the Iraqis in June 2004. Written almost like a diary, the memoir
shows how Bremer collaborated with the U.S. military, the United
Nations mission and various Iraqi factions to fill ``the chaotic
power vacuum'' with something resembling law and order.
On his arrival in Baghdad, Bremer says he felt as if he had
landed in ``a postapocalypse Los Angeles.'' His headquarters in
one of Hussein's former palaces smelled of ``diesel exhaust and
overloaded portable toilets.'' He ditched his dress shoes for a
pair of Timberland boots, which he wore with blue suits.
`Revolt on the Tigris'
The book unfortunately bogs down in blow-by-blow accounts
of diplomatic exchanges and bureaucratic maneuvering. Bremer's
days are long, hot and frustrating. While Bremer supported the war, he is concerned about being abandoned to become a fall guy for controversial decisions, such as his disbanding of the Iraqi army, an order he says came down through the political chain of command.
In the end Bremer, who survived numerous assassination attempts and had a bounty of 10,000 grams of gold on his head offered by Osama bin Laden, expresses little regret about the job, only wishing he’d done more to bolster the economy by limiting subsidies and improving overall security. Though short on startling disclosures, ``My Year in Iraq'' will be essential primary reading for future historians.
A more absorbing account of the occupation comes from Mark
Etherington, a U.K. diplomat who acted as governor of southern
Iraq's volatile Wasit province from October 2003 to May 2004. He
describes this stint in ``Revolt on the Tigris: The Al-Sadr
Uprising and the Governing of Iraq'' (Cornell, 252 pages, $25;
published in the U.K. by C. Hurst, 15 pounds).
Garrisoned in the town of Kut, Etherington and his U.S.
deputy, Timm Timmons, were charged with administering a
region that included about 1 million people and a stretch of
border with Iran running 145 kilometers (90 miles) long. The
group was initially protected by a modest contingent of
Ukrainian soldiers and later by an Abrams tank nicknamed ``Be
Sensitive.''
Wasit province was home to Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr,
who was fomenting a rebellion. The diplomat's limited defenses
proved inadequate when the cleric's Mehdi army attacked in April
2004, temporarily forcing him to flee the region.
Etherington displays the expected stiff upper lip under
pressure, yet manages to communicate the pathos of daily
civilian life in Iraq. Just before leaving al-Kut, Timmons says
something that sums up the whole occupation of Iraq:
``You know -- it just could have been done a lot better.''
Q&A with Julian Barnes on "Arthur & George"
Q&A with Julian Barnes, author of "Arthur & George"
By Edward Nawotka
Julian Barnes is a quintessential English novelist, albeit one who is also an unrepentant Francophile. It's only appropriate that he of all the writers in the U.K. would come across a British equivalent to the infamous 1896 Dreyfus Affair in France and make it the pivotal event in his new book: "Arthur & George" (Knopf, 386 pages, $24.95), Barnes' tenth work of fiction is a densely detailed historical novel that re-imagines an obscure episode from the life of Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, when in 1903, George Edalji, a half-Indian lawyer was tried and imprisoned for mutilating farm animals in Great Wyrley, Staffordshire. Doyle, sensing a miscarriage of justice, investigated the accusations and eventually secured Edalji's release and pardon.
The echoes to the Dreyfus Affair, in which writer Emile Zola rose to the defense of the Alsatian Jew Alfred Dreyfus who'd been mistakenly convicted of treason, are unmistakable.
"Arthur & George" was last year shortlisted for the Booker Prize -- Barnes's third time on the shortlist -- but lost out to John Banville's "The Sea."
Barnes, whose Oxbridge accent makes his speech sound as if his vocal chords have been marinating in cognac, spoke with Edward Nawotka by phone as he began his North American book tour. Barnes will read at
Nawotka: How did you find this story that seemed to have been lost to history to all but avid Sherlockians? Were you much of a Sherlockian to begin with?
Barnes: I came to it from a different direction: by reading about it in a book about the Dreyfus case. I began investigating and Conan Doyle came attached to the case. I read Sherlock Holmes as a boy and didn't know much about his life at all, so in writing the book I was discovering Conan Doyle as much as I was George Edalji. Had Kipling come attached I would have been just as happy.
Nawotka: Have you gotten a blizzard of letters from Sherlockians critiquing your portrayal of their hero? They tend to be fanatical about detail.
Barnes: True. Conan Doyle is the only writer that I know of who has three different literary clubs devoted to his memory. And there is a radical difference between the Sherlockians and the Doyleans. Some believe that Doyle was only the literary agent and Sherlock wrote the stories. Other true believers won't even mention Watson's name in public. It's all a form of literary fundamentalism. But this is not one of those books that has subtle allusions to Holmes or Doyle and I haven't heard from a single Sherlockian...perhaps they are the reviewers that didn't bark in night?
Nawotka: Why did you choose to write the story as a novel instead of a nonfiction account?
Barnes: The problems of doing it as a nonfiction book were twofold. First, very little is known about George and his family background. There are some photos and he wrote a couple of articles himself, but his character and nature are lost. As to what his life was like, I had to invent 95% of it.
Likewise, the period I'm covering in Conan Doyle's life is an emotional black hole, one which he lies about in his autobiography. I could have done it as nonfiction, but I would have had to say things like, "At this point in his life, Conan Doyle must surely have felt..." I hate the conditional tone. Prose fiction is the best way to describe how people think and feel.
Nawotka: Were you pleased to discover that Conan Doyle had a robust life outside his study? It makes him a more dynamic character.
Barnes: That, and he was also a very admirable man, generous and chivalrous. He believed action should be taken and wrongs be righted. Conan Doyle came from that generation of publicly involved writers who had influence with politicians. That has disappeared. If you ask Tony Blair who he rather be photographed with, Ian McEwan or Bob Geldoff, I doubt he would choose McEwan.
Nawotka: Are you envious of that time when writers had more influence?
Barnes: If you're asking if I'm a frustrated man of action, I'm not.
Nawotka: Why is it that interest in Conan Doyle, who was a lesser writer than some of his contemporaries, has endured?
Barnes: He created an archetypical character in Holmes. Mostly, I think people are intrigued by the idea of using the power of the intellect to work out crime. There's also a sort of nostalgia for that late-Victorian world, which translates so well into television.
Nawotka: It's something you can see by the popularity of the various BBC adaptations of Dickens novels and the like. The serialization of "Bleak House" has just started running on public television starring Gillian Anderson from the X-files.
Barnes: Ohhh, I thoroughly enjoyed that one! It's one of the best adaptations from Dickens I've ever seen. That woman really can act.
Nawotka: Though the true story of "Arthur & George" is over 100 years old, there are significant contemporary echoes. In particular, the case is largely about racism. Why has it largely been forgotten until now, while the Dreyfus case remains well-known.
Barnes: The Dreyfus case was about bigger issues and was about treason. French anti-Semitism was stronger than the Henny-penny racialist feelings in
Nawotka: It's been nearly a year since the book was published in
Barnes: I look forward to meeting readers. I like going to cities where I've never been, such as
Nawotka: Are you a collector?
Barnes: I'm a wine drinker. Collector is a dubious term. It usually means you just sit around and stare at the labels. I'm a collector of what's inside the bottles.
Sunday, February 05, 2006
Eve vs. eye: Ross King's The Judgment of Paris
Eve vs. eye
In his third book of popular art history, Ross King chronicles a radical shift in the way we see the world.
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Saturday, February 04, 2006
On September 19, 1870, the Prussian army of Kaiser Wilhelm I began bombarding Paris with long-range Krupp cannons. Within two weeks, the painter Édouard Manet, who was serving as a lieutenant in the National Guard responsible for defending the city, acknowledged the situation was desperate: "We can no longer get cafe au lait," he wrote in a letter to his wife. In November, he wrote that "there are now cat, dog and rat butchers in Paris. We no longer eat anything but horsemeat."
The resolution to turn horses into food would have been particularly unsettling to Manet's rival Jean Louis Ernest Meissonier, the most celebrated painter in late 19th-century Paris, and a man known for his precise depictions of horses. As befitted his higher status, Meissonier served as a lieutenant colonel in the Guard. For a short time, Manet worked on Meissonier's staff, where he mocked the older painter's habit of doodling during staff meetings, much to the amusement of their colleagues.
Within a half century, Meissonier would be reviled by art historians and Manet revered. How this reversal of fortune came about is the story Ross King tells in "The Judgment of Paris," his third work of art history.
King, a former Canadian academic who now lives near Oxford, England, began his writing career by penning a pair of historical novels. Accordingly, he brings an instinct for storytelling to his nonfiction, which features strong narrative arcs and a surfeit of historical detail. He first came to the attention of American readers six years ago with "Brunelleschi's Dome," a compelling book about the construction of Florence's Santa Maria del Fiore cathedral. The follow-up, 2002's "Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling," had an even more mainstream subject, the painting of the Sistine Chapel. It hit the New York Times best-seller list and was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award.
"The Judgment of Paris" tackles a somewhat more esoteric topic: the Paris art scene from 1863-1874, when Manet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Paul Cezanne and others challenged the establishment with their radical visions.
In the 1860s, the French art world was dominated by academic painters who rejected contemporary subjects in favor of romantic images of classical Greece or the Renaissance. Meissonier, their champion, favored miniaturized portraits of "silk-coated and lace-ruffled gentlemen" and photorealistic scenes of Napoleon's military victories.
The period itself favored what King calls "gauzy nostalgia"; the fashions of the court of Napoleon III mimicked the bicorn hats and silk stockings of previous centuries. The rest of French society dressed more practically, with the men in top hats and black frock coats. King notes that Manet's first act in defiance of convention was to depict Parisians in this contemporary style, earning him the moniker of a "realist" painter and the unflinching support of the writer Emile Zola.
King structures his book around the annual Paris Salon, "a rare venue for artists to expose their wares to the public and ... to make their reputations." It often attracted a million visitors — more than half the population of Paris.
Manet first submitted a painting to the Salon in 1859, entitled "The Absinthe Drinker." It depicted a drunken "rag-and-bone" man, and, as he expected, it was rejected. What dismayed the judges, even more than the debauched subject matter, was Manet's thick application of paint, broad brush strokes and suppressed details. Another Manet painting, "Music in the Tuileries," offered "a chaotic-looking blaze of figures painted with a smeary lack of fine detail." It so incensed the public that "they threatened violence."
The problem, writes King, was that the painting literally forced a viewer to look at it in a new way:
The viewing public was accustomed to standing close to paintings, studying them minutely and marveling over the delicacy of the handiwork. The work of a master like Meissonier even repaid, as John Ruskin would discover, the scrutiny of magnifying glass. But Manet's apparently clumsy brush strokes and lack of clarity in "Music of the Tuileries" did not lend themselves to this sort of appreciation.
During the next decade, though Manet endured still more critical ridicule, he forged a new direction in art that culminated in his masterpiece, "Olympia," a picture of a nude prostitute staring directly at the viewer. It appropriated the establishment icon of the classical nude and modernized it.
At the same time, Meissonier was mired in his own personal Waterloo, a painting called "Friedland, 1807." The painting, which depicted Napoleon's eponymous military victory, showed hundreds of horses in military formation, some at full gallop. Meissonier's painstaking technique required that he took almost a decade to complete the work. Typically, he built wax dioramas of the scene and made dozens of studies. He even went so far as to build a small railroad in his garden that enabled him to ride alongside galloping horses so he could accurately sketch them.
In "The Judgment of Paris" all this foment takes place against the backdrop of Napoleon III's Paris, a place awash in booze and sex (King estimates some 13 percent of the population was involved in prostitution) that eventually succumbs to the Prussians, the short-lived establishment of the Paris Commune and the adoption of la vie moderne. The painters themselves might admire King's skill in using this backdrop to highlight the artists in the foreground.
Though reading a book about 19th-century art-world politics may sound like a chore to some, King rarely descends to the level of pedagogy because he treats his story like a horse race between two very different artists. Meissonier sought to represent an idealized past as agreed on by all. Manet sought to represent the world around him through the haze of his own individuality.
By the end of the book, it is clear who has run the better race. Manet has finally won the favor of the Salon, where in 1873 his painting "Le Bon Bock" created a sensation. It inspired a restaurant in the Latin Quarter to change its name and helped turn Montmartre into a cultural center. Meissonier, for his part, has finished "Friedland, 1807," which was shown at an even bigger exhibition in Vienna, Austria. Today, it hangs in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art — just outside the "Manet Room."
"The Judgment of Paris" might not be as immediately accessible as King's previous books, but it offers a clear sense of how the politics and personalities of late 19th-century Europe fused to push art in a new direction — and, at least as far as the impressionists are concerned, onto the dorm room walls of college girls everywhere.
Austin writer Edward Nawotka is a book critic for Bloomberg News.
Sunday, January 22, 2006
The 'Monkey' on his back: Review of Nick Laird's Utterly Monkey.
The 'Monkey' on his back
Nick Laird swings through politics of Northern Ireland in mix of mundane, modern terror
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Saturday, January 21, 2006
If you think the people in your reading group can be harsh about a book they don't like, think again. In Northern Ireland, if the locals don't like your writing, you might end up dead.
In November, Belfast playwright Gary Mitchell, his wife and 7-year-old son went into hiding after Loyalist paramilitaries gave him four hours to "get out or be killed." The warning came days after the thugs blew up Mitchell's car and wrecked his house. The gunmen were angry because Mitchell had portrayed them as fools in his plays. What irked them even more is that the theater communities in London and Dublin gave Mitchell awards for the work.
Nick Laird also left Northern Ireland, but under his own volition, to attend Cambridge University. There, he met the somewhat better-known writer Zadie Smith, who is now his wife. After Cambridge, Laird worked as a corporate lawyer before packing it in to start a writing career. His first novel, "Utterly Monkey," has already won some awards in England, which means he better be careful about going home again.
"Utterly Monkey" is a lad-lit thriller about Danny Williams, a disgruntled lawyer from Northern Ireland who is living in London, and what happens when his hometown friend Geordie Wilson flees the North after getting kneecapped by the Loyalists. Geordie's sins: He stole cars to go joyriding, he dealt drugs and he dated a paramilitary's sister — all too common Ulster tales of woe.
The action starts when Geordie arrives on Danny's London doorstep, still limping and carrying 50,000 pounds he stole from the Loyalists. As one might expect, the paramilitaries are looking for their cash. By strange coincidence, a terrorist — one who reads Machiavelli and Sun Tzu — named Ian knows who has it and where to go looking for it.
When Geordie arrives, he's the least of Danny's concerns. Danny has just broken up with his girlfriend and is struggling with his job at a white-shoe London law firm, where he's working on a corporate takeover of Ulster Water, a Northern Ireland utility.
Laird spends a great deal of the novel parsing the lawyer's lot in life like a man who has lived it and not loved it: In a colleague's office he observes "a wooden golf putter was propped a little forlornly in the far corner, as if it dreamt of real grass." Danny, like his colleague Rollson, who pushes the firm to buy every conceivable ergonomic accoutrement for his office, isn't a "querulous man." He's just bored. His primary diversion is Ellen, a beautiful trainee lawyer, on whom he has a crush.
"Utterly Monkey" takes place over the week leading up to July 12, when the Protestants of Northern Ireland commemorate the 1690 Battle of the Boyne, in which Protestant William III defeated Catholic James II to regain control of England, Scotland and Ireland. The Loyalists, festooned in orange sashes, march through the streets and often right through Catholic neighborhoods, banging enormous drums and singing. It's as much a provocation as a celebration.
Though the novel's set-up is a fairly conventional one, in which our inadvertent hero tries to thwart terrorists while still getting the girl, "Utterly Monkey" offers a nuanced sense of the Loyalist side of the Troubles and how it still haunts those who have tried to move on. Ian, the well-read terrorist, is particularly sharp about the recent changes in the fortunes of the Ulster Protestants. (For years, the Protestants held swing seats in the British Parliament, giving them a disproportionate amount of power in London. Today, with numerous moderate and Catholic representatives from Northern Ireland sitting in Parliament, they've been marginalized.)
British novels are often a bit hard for Americans to understand. Even if you watch a lot of BBC America, the significance of a "mid-Atlantic accent" or why a character roots for the team that plays at Ibrox Stadium might be lost. Kazuo Ishiguro has speculated that writers, as a consequence of the demand to translate their works into multiple languages, unconsciously excise detail from their books. This often produces a kind of anesthetized literary voice, one that is articulate but cannot readily be placed.
Laird walks this fine line, managing to convey a lively sense of the people and politics of "that little patch of scorched earth" known as Northern Ireland without being too inscrutable. Which isn't to say he doesn't challenge his readers. Londoners and other Brits, many of whom, like Americans, only know of Northern Ireland what they see on TV, will be puzzled by the strange customs of his homeland, and why "when two Ulstermen sit down together, there's probably an even fifty-fifty chance they'll try to kill each other."
The book's denouement, which packs a nice narrative wallop, combines the best of high farce with modern terror. It's scary to realize that urban terror is something Londoners, Americans and the residents of Northern Ireland now all have in common.
Austin writer Edward Nawotka is a book critic for Bloomberg News. He lived in Northern Ireland off and on from 1995-99.
Monday, January 16, 2006
Review: Physical by James McManus
A gambler visits the Mayo Clinic to assess his odds, McManus' exam serves as rumination on health care
Review by Edward Nawotka
James McManus understands long odds. A semi-professional poker player who wrote about his fifth-place finish in the 2000 World Series of Poker in his previous book, "Positively Fifth Street," he knows "each drag off a spliff or a cigarette, each mouthful of garlic mashed potatoes or Billecart-Salmon brut rosé deducts x minutes, y seconds" off his life. All of which limits his chances of seeing any of his three daughters, two of them preteens, "speak as valedictorian of her law school class, get married, score her first goal."
At age 52, McManus finally fully realized that with his family history of heart attacks, including a grandfather who died of a coronary at age 35, the deck was stacked against him. That sudden and sobering realization propelled him to the Mayo Clinic in
The good doctors put him through a battery of tests, from dermatological and eye exams to blood and urine analysis. They gave him a "chest CT without biopsy," immunized him against hepatitis and counseled him to lose weight. In his own words, McManus was "bled, scraped, shaved, freeze-dried, stressed, scanned, and sanded, all by the best in the business." Throughout, McManus puts up a macho front. He fantasizes about "a two-mistress session" of S&M with his nurses and wants to "bump fists" with his gastroenterologist after the doc expertly lassos and removes a tiny polyp from McManus' colon. He even doesn't balk at the bill, $8,484.25. (It was covered by Harper's magazine as an expense for an article he wrote.)
Medically speaking, McManus is fortunate. His full-time job as professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago means he's not one of the 45 million Americans without medical insurance. Plus, his body is more or less OK, too: His only major health concern is his cholesterol, which runs "moderately high." As one might expect, his doctors advised him to stop indulging in his predinner martinis and post-dinner Parliament Lights and to exercise.
Early in the book, McManus establishes his skepticism of the medical establishment -- and for good reason. His younger brother died at age 41 from complications of a bone marrow transplant at Johns Hopkins. And his son committed suicide at age 22, possibly as a result of symptoms of depression exacerbated by the antidepressants he was taking. As a result of his suspicion, McManus does his research, and along the way treats us edifying disquisitions on everything from the history of smoking and obesity to toilets and vasectomies.
Being a novelist, as well as a gambler and a journalist, McManus seasons his text with literary and historical allusions. All the while, he highlights factoids that bear repeating. I'm sure you already know that insurance companies spend a whopping 31 cents of every dollar on paperwork instead of medical care, but it's no less startling the 15th time you've heard it.
McManus' greatest health concern is his eldest daughter, Bridget, 30, who suffers from diabetes. In discussing her affliction, he makes a strong argument in support of embryonic stem cell research, which might help her and, according to White House statistics, "approximately 128 million Americans." He castigates the Bush administration for having a "schizoid" position that curtails 99.8 percent of stem cell research and lionizes the South Korean government for supporting groundbreaking research.
In particular, McManus looks to the work of scientist Hwang Woo-Suk, who in 2004 claimed to have cloned a human embryo and extracted stem cells from it. Regrettably, in December, the same scientist disclosed that his claim was faked, which will no doubt crush the author.
When he's not being a nagging polemicist, McManus is generous with praise where he feels praise is due. In particular, the Mayo Clinic comes out looking like a paragon of good sense and medical idealism. He explains that the not-for-profit institution offers general health care to much of southeastern
The majority of us find medical matters an intimidating mystery. McManus' grab bag of personal anecdote, medical history and polemic offers an entertaining and often insightful look at one man's experience with the health care system. If there's any message to take away from McManus' book, it's to enjoy your good health so long as you still have it. Once you lose it, getting it back is an all-consuming task.
Friday, November 18, 2005
Why Do I Love These People? Honest and Amazing Stories of Real Families by Po Bronson
Why Do I Love These People? Honest and Amazing Stories of Real Families by Po Bronson
This article originally appeared in People magazine.
'Think your family's dysfunctional? Bestselling author Po Bronson (What Should I Do with My Life?) decided in 2002 that he wanted to "decode the mystery" of family relationships. Bronson gave the project three years, interviewed 700 people and found 18 fascinating families whose secrets are revealed here. Along the way, he unearthed enough juicy drama for 20 episodes of Oprah--homing in on the heartbreak and healing, the emotional tremors and transitions that are part of every family's saga.
Few readers will be surprised by the author's assertion that the face of the American family is changing. He notes that fewer than 23 percent of the 57 million married couples in the United States have children, and that disparate racial and religious backgrounds are no longer a rarity. It's what's going on inside those families that captures our attention; the book's strength lies in Bronson's depiction of the sometimes eccentric ways family members maintain their ties. Anne Jacobsen asked for and received her husband's permission to have an affair; Mary Garrett, a post office worker, never hugged her eight children but sacrificed beyond measure to send six to Ivy League colleges. Bronson's conclusion? "Real love ... is a mere starting point." It's a theme worth exploring and a book worth reading.
This article originally appeared in People magazine.
'Think your family's dysfunctional? Bestselling author Po Bronson (What Should I Do with My Life?) decided in 2002 that he wanted to "decode the mystery" of family relationships. Bronson gave the project three years, interviewed 700 people and found 18 fascinating families whose secrets are revealed here. Along the way, he unearthed enough juicy drama for 20 episodes of Oprah--homing in on the heartbreak and healing, the emotional tremors and transitions that are part of every family's saga.
Few readers will be surprised by the author's assertion that the face of the American family is changing. He notes that fewer than 23 percent of the 57 million married couples in the United States have children, and that disparate racial and religious backgrounds are no longer a rarity. It's what's going on inside those families that captures our attention; the book's strength lies in Bronson's depiction of the sometimes eccentric ways family members maintain their ties. Anne Jacobsen asked for and received her husband's permission to have an affair; Mary Garrett, a post office worker, never hugged her eight children but sacrificed beyond measure to send six to Ivy League colleges. Bronson's conclusion? "Real love ... is a mere starting point." It's a theme worth exploring and a book worth reading.
Wednesday, November 16, 2005
Turow’s WWII Novel Surrenders to Cliché
Turow’s WWII Novel Surrenders to Cliché: New Books
Reviewed by Edward Nawotka
Scott Turow risks deviating from his usual courtroom thriller, to try a World War II spy story in the mold of Alan Furst. “Ordinary Heroes” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 370 pages, $25) recounts the story of WWII JAG lawyer David Dubin, a Lieutenant in Patton’s army, who in October 1944 is ordered to find and arrest Major Robert Martin, a rogue OSS spy and possible double agent. It’s a mission that mysteriously leads to Dubin being court-martialed with the possibility of execution.
“Ordinary Heroes” begins in the present when Dubin’s son Stanley, a 55-year-old burnt-out journalist (and minor character from 1987s “Presumed Innocent”) discovers among his father’s belongings a cache of letters addressed to a mystery woman and records that reveal Dubin’s heretofore unknown court-martial. Investigating,
Dubin is the second generation son of Russian immigrants and Jewish socialists. He shortened his name from Dubinsky to mask his identity upon enrolling in a posh Midwestern college and arrives in
On the second page of the book, Dubin vows to “happily remain a lawyer, not a foot soldier.” But just as soon as he tracks down Martin, a man with the charm of William Powell and the courage of Audie Murphy, Dubin is cajoled into joining a mission to blow-up an underground arms depot using a locomotive wired with explosives. Here he meets Gita Lodz, a vampy Polish partisan who will seduce and dupe Dubin, helping Martin repeatedly escape arrest. And when Martin does escape, Dubin pursues both him and Gita, for whom he has fallen, going so far as to make a harrowing low altitude parachute jump into occupied territory to continue the chase.
War fever inevitably infects Dubin (and Turow) who is distracted from his prey by the German army making its last stand at the
As a novel of derring-do, “Ordinary Heroes” delivers plenty of action and romantic interludes. But the book fails outright as a mystery: too early on Turow reveals that Dubin’s court-martial was dismissed and his sentence dropped, and it’s all too obvious how the relationship between Dubin, Martin and, especially, Gita will work itself out.
Although Turow based this novel in part on his father’s experiences as a doctor with Patton’s army, the story itself just seems overly familiar. Anyone that has already seen “Band of Brothers,” which features many similar scenes and settings, will likely experience frequent moments of deja-vu.
If this seems like a surprising direction for the author who made his reputation writing modern legal thrillers, it’s not. Turow has turned to writing polemics. His previous book, 2003s “Ultimate Punishment” outlined his arguments against the death penalty. “Ordinary Heroes,” in addition to being an enjoyable, if hackneyed WWII adventure story, is also a vehicle for Turow to deliver lawyerly disquisitions on war, religion, and patriotism. Unfortunately, all too often Turow’s characters become talking heads who slip into leaden cliché--such as Dubin’s observation that “The general’s names might be remembered by historians, but it was [real soldiers] who would fight the true war,” and Martin’s proclamation, “I thought fascism was the plague. But war is. War is.”—that are bested only by the recent Star Wars prequels.
It’s been fun, but Turow should to the courtroom where he has total command of the milieu.
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