THE NY TIMES --browsing books: editors' choice

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后面的英文文章是BOOK REVIEWS,到NY TIMES的BOOKS连接里面还有相关的音像采访资料等等。。。

The New York Times
March 6, 2005
BROWSING BOOKS
Editors' Choice

FICTION | NONFICTION

Recently reviewed books of particular interest.
The Courage Consort: Three Novellas
By MICHEL FABER
Stylish, eerie fictions about baffled people in opaque situations.

Damned If I Do: Stories
By PERCIVAL EVERETT
Quiet, intelligent tales, alert to place, often tall (as when fish talk).

The Displaced of Capital
By ANNE WINTERS
These poems focus on New York, money and the poor and powerless.

'Empire Rising': How the Irish Paved CivilizationEmpire Rising
By THOMAS KELLY
A tale of immigrant construction workers and corrupt politicians in 1930's New York.

'God Lives in St. Petersburg': Expensive TripsGod Lives in St. Petersburg: And Other Stories
By TOM BISSELL
The characters in these short stories are Americans adrift in Central Asia.

Josie and Jack
By KELLY BRAFFET
The narrator of this dark first novel is obsessed with her older brother.

'Nice Big American Baby': Absolutely FabulistNice Big American Baby: Stories
By JUDY BUDNITZ
These stories are playful and experimental, but grounded in political outrage.

Please Don't Come Back From the Moon
By DEAN BAKOPOULOS
In this novel, the fathers in a working-class neighborhood leave home en masse.

This Is a Voice From Your Past: New and Selected Stories
By MERRILL JOAN GERBER
Disturbingly inconclusive stories of lives interrupted by glitches.

The White Rose
By JEAN HANFF KORELITZ
The plot of "Rosenkavalier," turned into a fable about strivers in Manhattan.

You Are Not the One: Stories
By VESTAL McINTYRE
Elegant fiction, written around situations improbable but not impossible, like a pet octopus that grows too large for its tank.

NONFICTION | FICTION

'Big Bang': The Real Creation ScienceBig Bang: The Origin of the Universe
By SIMON SINGH
Simon Singh tells the story of the universe and profiles the people who have explained that story.

The Crisis: The President, the Prophet, and the Shah -- 1979 and the Coming of Militant Islam
By DAVID HARRIS
An engrossing account of the 444-day Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-80.

'An End to Suffering': Philosopher KingAn End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World
By PANKAJ MISHRA
The Buddha, as Pankaj Mishra describes him, was not a religious figure but a philosopher who sought to relieve suffering during a time of upheaval.

French Women Don't Get Fat
By MIREILLE GUILIANO
The French know how to live, how to arrange scarves and how to eat without gaining weight.

God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It
By JIM WALLIS
An evangelical Christian urges Democrats to abandon secularism and take back the faith.

John Kenneth GalbraithJohn Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics
By RICHARD PARKER
The career of a public intellectual, ambassador and aphorist.

Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Laws That Changed America
By NICK KOTZ
In this account, Lyndon Johnson emerges as a man of moral courage, speaking intolerable truth to his fellow white Southerners.

'Love, Poverty, and War': Of Bellow and BaghdadLove, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays
By CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Christopher Hitchens, whose new book collects essays on literature and politics, is happiest when he has an enemy and least happy when he is most content.

Martin Van Buren
By TED WIDMER
Ted Widmer's biography rescues an underrated politician by subsuming a failed presidency within a more momentous career.

'The Orientalist': The Chic of ArabyThe Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life
By TOM REISS
Tom Reiss explains how a not-so-nice Russian Jewish boy became a dagger-wielding Muslim writer.

The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick: How a Spectacular Hoax Became History
By PETER LAMONT
A famous (but impossible) magic trick has its roots in a journalistic hoax.

The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe
By ROGER PENROSE
Roger Penrose dismantles what is known about the universe and then puts it back together again.

'Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons': In a Galaxy Far, Far AwayRonald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
By PAUL LETTOW
Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative was meant to bring about nuclear disarmament, argues Paul Lettow.

Savage Summit: The True Stories of the First Five Women Who Climbed K2, the World's Most Feared Mountain
By JENNIFER JORDAN
Jennifer Jordan highlights sexism among alpinists in this account of five women who climbed to the top of K2.

authorA Sense of the Mysterious: Science and the Human Spirit
By ALAN LIGHTMAN
Alan Lightman, novelist and former astrophysicist, is modest about his extraordinary twin career in these essays.

Singing in a Strange Land: C. L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the Transformation of America
By NICK SALVATORE
Nick Salvatore explores the life of Aretha Franklin's father, a pastor and a leading figure in the Northern branch of the civil rights movement.




                               
RECENTLY ON THE COVER OF THE BOOK REVIEW

'Pol Pot': The Killer's SmilePol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare
By PHILIP SHORT
Philip Short tries to fathom Pol Pot's mysterious personality and his place in Cambodia's violent history.

Perfect Madness: 'Perfect Madness': The Mommy Trap
By JUDITH WARNER
This denunciation of American-style mothering wants to be the "Feminine Mystique" of the 21st century.

authorIn the Rose Garden of the Martyrs: A Memoir of Iran
By CHRISTOPHER DE BELLAIGUE
Christopher De Bellaigue aims to complicate a world that too many associate only with ayatollahs and slogans of "Death to America."

Haruki MurakamiKafka on the Shore
By HARUKI MURAKAMI
Haruki Murakami's novels are obscure but bewitching. His latest is no exception, although it is a departure in other ways.

Death of an Ordinary Man
By GLEN DUNCAN
The deceased hero of this novel has the chance to contemplate a life he didn't dare to understand while he was living it.

CollapseCollapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
By JARED DIAMOND
Jared Diamond draws on vanished societies to explain how cultures contribute to their own demise.

Blink Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
By MALCOLM GLADWELL
"Decisions made very quickly," Malcolm Gladwell says in his book about first impressions, "can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately."

Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves
By ADAM HOCHSCHILD
How the struggle availed, especially when black Haitian armies beat white French and British ones.

Though the Heavens May Fall: The Landmark Trial That Led to the End of Human Slavery
By STEVEN M. WISE
The 1772 London case that found slavery so offensive the laws of England would not enforce it.

The World of Christopher Marlowe The World of Christopher Marlowe
By DAVID RIGGS
Born the same year as Shakespeare; died at 29. Was Marlowe, the subject of a new biography, the better writer while alive?

'Hard News': Troubled TimesThe Complete Cartoons of the New Yorker
Edited by ROBERT MANKOFF
Some 68,000 cartoons that shaped national sensibilities since the 1920's; a huge book and two CD's.

De Kooning: An American Master
By MARK STEVENS and ANNALYN SWAN
A major biography explores Willem de Kooning's glorious, contrarian role as a leader of the Abstract Expressionists.

author Gilead
By MARILYNNE ROBINSON
Marilynne Robinson's novel is demanding, grave and lucid, suffused with a spiritual force rare in contemporary fiction.

'Runaway': Alice's WonderlandRunaway
By ALICE MUNRO
Quotation can't do the book justice, and neither can synopsis. The way to do it justice is to read it.

Borges: A Life
By EDWIN WILLIAMSON
A huge biography that interprets the writings and the life through each other.

Ronny and Nancy: Their Path to the White House, 1911 to 1980
By BOB COLACELLO
A social history in the sense of life in high society and what it did for the Reagans.

Kaufman & Co.: Broadway Comedies
By GEORGE S. KAUFMAN with EDNA FERBER, MOSS HART, RING LARDNER and MORRIE RYSKIND
Nine plays by the celebrated collaborator, director and play doctor.


                       

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The New York Times
February 20, 2005
CHRONICLE
Short Stories: Squeeze Plays
By MAGGIE GALEHOUSE

In an age of split-second access to unlimited information, a short story is wonderfully finite: the end is always in sight. Yet the best short stories aren't short on story at all. Instead, they manage to fit an unwieldy world into a very small space. The trick for the writer is to hide the muscle it takes to pull off that compression, convincing us that the world on the page spins easily beyond the story's boundaries.

In You Are Not the One, Vestal McIntyre builds arresting, elegant fiction around situations that while often unlikely are not at all inconceivable. Most of his characters are social outcasts confronting their own brands of unbelonging: the boy in ''Octo'' who struggles to keep a pet octopus that has grown too large for its tank; the teenager in a kangaroo suit in ''Sahara'' who's kidnapped after being mistaken for a high-school mascot. McIntyre's stories can be funny, but in a scary, manic Augusten Burroughs kind of way. And when they aren't -- when they focus on something as unexpected as a high school student who sets out to read ''Moby-Dick'' to a cousin with Down syndrome -- they're crushingly sweet.

Daphne Kalotay's collection of linked stories, Calamity: And Other Stories, visits three women over more than two decades. At 40, Annie is a sexy graduate student, back in bed with her ex-husband; in her 60's, she's a frizzy-haired feminist with sagging breasts and a not very exciting philosophy professorship. Her friend Eileen buries a young husband, reclaims her health and raises a son. Rhea is first seen as a girl, catching her mother impulsively kissing another woman; in one of Rhea's parting shots, she's pessimistically bracing for an emergency landing on an airplane. Kalotay's collection builds force so quietly that when all the characters appear together in the final story you're stunned -- by how well it works and by how familiar these women now feel.

Merrill Feitell takes on the troubles of young, educated urban adults in Here Beneath Low-Flying Planes. Her characters are usually in the midst of awkward transitions: a woman, pregnant with her ex-boyfriend's baby, attends his wedding to someone else; a new mother, irritated by her husband's neediness, craves a bit of her pre-mom life. Feitell also has a knack for the odd, beautiful image. In a story called ''And Then You Stand Up,'' a woman with a maze of scars on her face starts to cry: ''The first few tears traveled left across the web, then diagonally down, and then right. When those deepest lines filled, they overflowed to shallower scars, until the rivulets traversed in all ways the jagged ruts of her face. She often wondered if the scars would grow deeper, like the Grand Canyon, salt and motion eroding the left side of her to the bone.''

The new and selected stories in This Is a Voice From Your Past don't reach for tidy endings or moments of insight. Instead, Merrill Joan Gerber bravely presents tales that are as disturbingly inconclusive as real life. Often, she captures characters whose lives have been interrupted by an ordinary-seeming glitch -- a mother exerting too much control after her daughter's baby is born; a neighbor becoming increasingly annoyed by the incessant barking of the dogs next door -- and then sticks around to see how they handle it. In ''Honeymoon,'' a restless 19-year-old bride leaves her middle-aged husband at a Las Vegas casino and tries to hook up with a young couple at Hoover Dam. When the couple vanish, the newlywed just gets back on the tour bus, cursing her luck and studying her wedding picture.

Damned if I Do, Percival Everett's wide-ranging new collection, is underpinned by a quiet intelligence and an acute sense of place. There's a tall tale about a talking fish who saves a man's marriage and a magical story about a man who can repair everything from a noisy refrigerator to a dead body. Occasionally, a black man shows up where white people don't expect him: in a small town in Utah or a South Carolina bar, playing ''Dixie.'' Everett's depiction of race is much like his treatment of everything else: straight up, without elaboration. ''Hey, you're black,'' says an obese white man who has just threatened Austin, a character in ''Afraid of the Dark.'' ''I know,'' Austin replies, studying the man's fist. ''I would prefer if you didn't hit me.''

The title of T. M. McNally's new collection, Quick, refers not to speed but to the essence of a thing -- as in ''cut to the quick.'' These dense, dark stories, set mostly in the Southwest, show fractured characters struggling just to survive. In the strongest selections, McNally starts with ripples of dysfunction and then edges into the hollow of pain where they began. But while McNally articulates despair with deadly accuracy, he occasionally musters some dryly humorous postmodern optimism. Says the narrator of ''Wonderland'': ''First comes love, then comes loss. And what follows always is a chance to go outside, wander down the drive and check the mail.''

Alexander McCall Smith, best known for the ''No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency'' series, has gathered traditional stories from Zimbabwe and Botswana in The Girl Who Married a Lion: And Other Tales From Africa. These quick, plainly told fables feature places where people and animals live in close proximity and somebody has to walk miles to a river every day just to collect water. The personalities of Africa's animals -- the wiliness of the hare, the gullibility of the lion, the laziness of the baboon -- take shape as the book proceeds. And there are clear moral lessons here, useful for parents everywhere. ''The Grandmother Who Was Kind to a Smelly Girl'' could not, for example, be more strident in its message that parents must love their children, even at what looks (or smells) like their worst.

Finally, the Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer has reprinted 21 stories from some of the biggest names in contemporary fiction for a worthy cause. The profits from Telling Tales will go to provide H.I.V. and AIDS preventive education and to treat patients of the disease in southern Africa. A collection that slips John Updike between Günter Grass and Chinua Achebe, José Saramago between Arthur Miller and Es'kia Mphahlele, is truly an international mix of plot and character. For readers who need a break from collections seasoned by one author's sensibility, this stew of humanity is a welcome change.

Maggie Galehouse is a reporter for The Arizona Republic.


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The New York Times
February 13, 2005
'Empire Rising': How the Irish Paved Civilization
By JOE KLEIN
EMPIRE RISING
By Thomas Kelly.
390 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $25.

NO writer owns New York -- not the way that William Kennedy owns Albany or Raymond Chandler once owned Los Angeles. The city is just too big. The best lay claim to a neighborhood, an ethnic group or a moment. Damon Runyon had Broadway in the 30's; Edith Wharton, high society in the Gilded Age; Henry Roth, the immigrant Lower East Side; Louis Auchincloss, the Upper East Side; more recently, Jonathan Lethem has captured a significant patch of Brooklyn. Now comes Thomas Kelly to stake his claim -- on a group, Irish immigrant construction workers, and on a transaction that is central to the political geography of the city: the kickback. ''Nothing,'' he writes, at the outset of his new novel, ''Empire Rising,'' ''gets built in Gotham without a kickback.''

Kelly is a former construction worker -- he worked his way through Fordham, that underappreciated Jesuit launching pad in the Bronx -- and a former advance man for Mayor David Dinkins; his resume positions him perfectly for his chosen turf. His claim is not quite literary. He is neither an elegant stylist nor a particularly close observer of the human condition. But there is a compelling muscularity to his work -- the plots barrel along, the characters are wildly colorful -- and there is a dead-on authenticity to the dialogue and the atmospherics. There is also a bracing, and rare, appreciation for the sheer satisfaction of honest work:

''Briody steadied his legs and back and torso and arms and clenched his jaw against the rattle of the pneumatic gun. His muscles were fluid one second with movement, static the next to drive the rivet home, a contracting and easing of his brawn that over the weeks had become as regular as breathing. The gang moved in perfect sync as four parts of one whole, advancing nonstop from beam to column to beam. The sun was out now, overhead and hot. The morning chill was gone. Sweat poured down their backs. Briody watched their rivet punk walk along a beam with a burlap bag full of bolts slung over his shoulder, his hat askance. He was 17 and glided along the six-inch-wide crossbeam with the assurance of the oblivious.''

The work in question is the grandest imaginable, the construction of the Empire State Building in 1930 -- a particularly resonant moment in the history of New York, the exclamation point that punctuated the Roaring Twenties. The stock market has recently crashed, but the depth of the economic abyss is not entirely apparent yet. The city is still blithely ignoring Prohibition, dancing the Charleston, drowning in bathtub gin. Gentleman Jimmy Walker is the mayor, nonchalantly adulterous, complaisant, casually corrupt. Franklin Roosevelt is governor, about to run for president, anxious to separate himself from the local political stench, and also from his predecessor -- Al Smith, a Roman Catholic and, arguably, Tammany Hall's finest flower, a great governor but a disaster as a presidential candidate in 1928. (Smith, for his part, detests Roosevelt.) Tammany itself is in decline, still suffering after the death of the brilliant ''silent'' boss Charles Murphy, and run now by an insurance man, John F. Curry, a shadowy nonpresence in ''Empire Rising.'' (Curry's absence is a distinct personal disappointment to me since my grandfather, also named Joe Klein, ran that boss's favored conduit for honest graft: the John F. Curry Insurance Agency.)

''Empire Rising'' is, then, a historical novel -- and there are perils that come with the territory, foremost of which is what an editor of mine once called the ''Oh, look, there's Walt Whitman'' problem. It takes a certain amount of grit -- Kelly would use a more graphic reference -- to mix and match historical and fictional characters. Even so talented an artist as E. L. Doctorow had only intermittent success with it in ''Ragtime.'' And Kelly has his hands full here, introducing not only Jimmy Walker, Al Smith and Franklin Roosevelt, but also Babe Ruth, Lewis Hine and Primo Carnera. Judge Crater is a character. In fact, the mystery of the judge's disappearance is ''solved'' by Kelly, which also takes grit.

Some of the historical showboating is a diversion -- the celebrities, with the exception of the elegant Mayor Walker, don't have much life to them -- but Kelly has chosen a particular time and place, and the elected officials of that moment are, each in his way, crucial to the intricate choreography of corruption in old New York.

At the center of ''Empire Rising,'' though, is Johnny Farrell, a fictional aide to Mayor Walker. Farrell's job is to orchestrate the kickbacks. Early on, Kelly explains how it worked:

''The developers needed two changes in the building code to make the Empire State Building feasible, never mind profitable. Steel gauge and elevator speed. Two simple adjustments in the way skyscrapers were built that the mayor had vetoed twice without comment. Farrell had played the developers beautifully. . . . [He] had secured the mayor's signature, after doubling its price, of course, to a nice round one million dollars. And that was just the beginning. There were to be dozens of subcontractors on the job who would have to pay for the privilege, not to mention ancillary work like sewer lines, roads and a sparkling new subway station. Plus, someone had to meet the gambling and policy needs of several thousand workers. Farrell controlled all of it.''

Farrell is a second-generation Irish immigrant, college-educated but street-smart. He dresses flashy -- diamond stickpin, fancy watch -- drops $20 tips and flaunts an upper-class Protestant wife and kids. He wants to be loyal to his old boys from the neighborhood, but there is a city to run and new alliances beckon.

There is a lot to work with here, and I wish Kelly had given us a bit more of Farrell's inner life, the conflicts that cause him to be just a shade too weak to be a really effective bagman, a shade too decent to be a truly frightening villain. (Frankie Keefe, the corrupt Teamster boss in Kelly's previous novel, ''The Rackets,'' was a magnificently awful bad guy.) Indeed, the emotional heart of ''Empire Rising'' lies elsewhere, in the romance between Farrell's Irish immigrant mistress, Grace Masterson, and a construc-tion worker, Mike Briody, who spends his spare time running guns for the Irish Republican Army.

The word most often used, not always favorably, to describe this sort of novel is sprawling, but Kelly is a big-hearted and admirably ambitious writer. He wants to show the city top to bottom, from Jimmy Walker's boudoir to the Irish pubs in the South Bronx where the construction workers drink their paychecks. ''The Rackets'' had a similar scope -- it was about a Teamsters Union election in the 1990's (the mayor, unnamed in that case, was a deftly arrogant Giuliani sort). In both books, Kelly takes lots of chances, drawing his characters broadly, jamming the plots with coincidence, violence and melodrama. Not all of it works, but Kelly's city is palpably alive and passionate, and very recognizably New York -- especially in the vertiginous rush of upward mobility, the fissures it causes within families, the loyalties strained, the traditions lost.

Kelly knows in his bones the lesson that Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer posited in their classic of urban sociology, ''Beyond the Melting Pot'': this is a tribal town, and ethnicity trumps economic class as a social determinant. The tribes have their rituals, and Kelly knows his own too well to gild the lily: his Irish construction workers drink hard, curse with genius and swoon over their mothers. They are pigheaded, honor bound and always game for a good punch-up. His heroines are a construction worker's fantasy -- tall, gorgeous, tough-talking and with no illusions at all about Irish men. Those who belong to other tribes, especially the Italians, are incomprehensibly barbaric. (In both ''Empire Rising'' and ''The Rackets,'' there are Italian mobsters who terrify their Irish counterparts -- Irish violence, according to Kelly, is volcanic, emotional, a consequence of pride and stubbornness; Italian violence is dispassionate, surgical, corporate.)

And at the center of Thomas Kelly's New York, more vital than plot or characters, is politics. Not the politics of elections, personalities, reform or progress -- no, this is the politics of the never-ending transaction. Public employees' unions may supplant Tammany, bundled campaign contributions may replace envelopes filled with cash, and new ethnic groups provide the crooks and the muscle labor. But the buildings still go up, the contracts are still let out (and not always to the lowest bidder) and zoning variances remain an adventure. There are lawyers, insurance brokers, pension fund managers and mobsters crawling all over each other for a payday, and good government sorts (''goo-goos'' is the term of art) trying to thwart them. Kelly is too smart for idealism, too romantic for reflexive cynicism. He is a realist, who understands that there's just too much here -- too much money, glamour, power -- for the city to ever completely reform itself. The structures are too big to run without a little grease. ''Empire Rising'' is an ode to urban grease; I'll never look at that grand old building the same way again.

Joe Klein is the political columnist for Time magazine and the author of ''Primary Colors.''


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