Books at Sage

Home Truths

salomd — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 13:49:29 +0000

This short novel by the great British novelist David Lodge is actually an adaptation by Lodge of a play of the same title. It reads almost like an update of Allbee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The issues here, however, are fame and the obsessive celebrity culture of our time. The dialogue is quick, sharp, and witty, as one would expect from Lodge, and about half-way through I was able to forget that it was adapted from the stage. By the end, I was hooked. I won’t spoil the ending, but I did see it coming about ten pages from its reveal.

David Lodge, Home Truths: A Novella. London: Secker and Warburg, 1999. Available in the US as a Penguin, 978-0140291803, $12, 128 pp.

Paradise, New York

salomd — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 12:51:46 +0000

This novel, published in 1998, is an insightful and insider look at the life of Jewish-Americans in the Catskills in the 1970s. Lots of inside jokes here, so if you were a bungalow kid or went to the Concord in the 1970s, this book is for you. If not, much of it will not connect for you. Nevertheless, it is a very enjoyable read by the director of the writing program at the University of Michigan. Pollack’s other work, including a very well-received volume of short stories, also treats the “Jewish-American” theme, but I think this novel does a splendid job of conveying the warmth, the hope, and the fun of “the mountains” in the 1970s. The story of Lucy Applebaum trying to save her family’s Catskill hotel, the Garden of Eden, the novel includes some nice twists and turns, enough to conclude with a somewhat surprise ending.

Eileen Pollack, Paradise, New York. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998. 251pp. 978-1566397896. 23.95.

Moonwalking with Einstein

salomd — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 14:54:52 +0000

Joshua Foer began this non-fiction study of memory with a fascination with how technology is supplanting our abilities and need for memory. The book ends with him winning the World Memory Championship–an unlikely ending indeed. Foer writes with an ease and comfortable voice that makes each page turn almost by itself. His historical material on memory, dating to the ancient world and the Middle Ages, is accurate and insightful (though a bit over simplistic for a scholarly reader). He has fun with memory, and we can remember (ironic?) how we also used mnemonic devices and other tricks in school to remember. The tricks (and he admits as do the “experts” that they are tricks that anyone can learn) he uses made me think of how Mrs. Gitterman, my second grade teacher, taught me to spell “friend.” I used to mix up the i and e; “you never fry your friend.” To this day, that runs through my mind when I have to spell that word.

Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. New York: Viking, 2011. 978-1594202292. $26.95.

Atlas of Remote Islands

salomd — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 14:48:58 +0000

This beautifully-designed book is a wonderful evening meditation. Subtitled “Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will,” the book is an atlas of some of the most remote little islands in the world. Schalansky, a German typographer (who also has one designs for the book and its font, which she created), begins with a beautifully-written reflection on maps, cartography, and atlases. She then gives us a one-page map-like illustration of each island with a facing page meditation, usually historical, on the place. Oh, and all of the places are real.

Judith Schalansky, Atlas of Remote Islands. New York: Penguin, 2010. 9780143118206. $28.

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

salomd — Sun, 01 Jul 2012 12:56:13 +0000

I had been waiting to read this novel from some time now, and I finally got to it. Science fiction? Literary fiction? Memoir? This is a mash-up of all of them. Charles Yu (yes, the author’s name as well), a time travel technician, is searching for his father through time. Yu’s theory is that our physical selves are time machines, the our actual selves are disconnected from the physical machine of our body. The novel is the intersection of the narrator’s memoir with a copy of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. A bit postmodern.

In the process we get not only insight into the nature of time travel, we also get some quite eloquent writing, for example: “Everyone has a time machine. Everyone is a time machine. It’s just that most people’s machines are broken. The strangest and hardest kind of time travel is the unaided kind. People get stuck, people get looped. People get trapped. But we are all time machines. We are all perfectly engineered time machines, technologically equipped to allow the inside user, the traveler riding inside each of us, to experience time travel, and loss, and understanding. We are universal time machines manufactured to the most exacting specifications possible. Every single one of us.”

An interesting, insightful read that should not scare of the non-technical or non-scifi minded.

Charles Yu. How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. New York: Vintage, 2010. 239pp. $14.95.

The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood

salomd — Thu, 14 Jun 2012 14:27:05 +0000

James Gleick writes the kind of books many of us wish we could. His book on chaos theory is now a must-read for any non-scientist; other books on Isaac Newton and Richard Feynman are insightful and clever. In The Information Gleick tackles the very notion of information, beginning in pre-literate culture and working his way forward, weaving the history, to the present day of Google and Twitter. Along the way, we find out about the telegraph and telephone and early computers. The book is indeed a history; I’m not sure I gleaned the “theory,” other than that we are not really dealing with a time that different than the late-Middle Ages, after Gutenberg, when people felt overwhelmed by the volume of data. A flood? You bet. The book itself is a compendium to the flood of information. As big as it the volume is, I was intrigued on every page.

James Gleick, The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood. New York: Pantheon, 2011. 544pp. 978-0375423727.

The Swerve

salomd — Thu, 14 Jun 2012 14:22:08 +0000

Stephen Greenblatt does it again. The Swerve brings Lucretius to life for a modern audience–who knew? Greenblatt, the father of New Historicism in literary theory (have I lost you yet?), shows that he is able to wear many hats. Not only does he continue to write hardcore literary analysis (see his recent book on Shakespeare called Shakespeare’s Freedom), but her he follows up his award-winning Will in the World with a book on sleuthing, medieval libraries, ancient philosophy, and the modern world. I have to say that reading it did not prompt me, as I thought it would, to go back to Lucretius himself, but Greenblatt is again adept at showing us how the Middle Ages and Renaissance formed the modern world.

Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How The World Became Modern. New York: WW Norton, 2011. 356pp. 978-0393064476.

Hope: A Tragedy

salomd — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 20:35:19 +0000

This is it. Here is this year’s National Book Award winner (or at least a nominee)–that’s my prediction, and I’m sticking to it. To call Shalom Auslander’s new novel a “Holocaust novel” would be like calling For Whom the Bell Tolls a “war novel.” Solomon Kugel is going through a crisis. He has just moved his family into a new home in upstate New York, but before they even get settled, he makes a disturbing discovery. Anne Frank is living in the attic of their new home. Yes, that Anne Frank. At least, it seems like it’s Anne Frank. She’s old. She smells. She seems close to death. She’s working on a new piece of writing–a novel. Although she’s sold 32 million copies of her diary, she’s finished with, as she puts it, “that Holocaust shit.” Kugel is in crisis. A Jew by birth, if not by practice, how can he throw Anne Frank out of his house? Add to this that his mother has moved in, living out what is supposed to be her last days. Kugel’s mother tells horrific tales of the concentration camps and the millions who were killed by Hitler and the Nazis. There’s one problem–Kugel’s mother was never in a concentration camp. She was born in the USA in the 1940s. She is dealing with a heaping load of survivor’s guilt. Her hero is Alan Dershowitz, who she believes will save her, and anyone, from potential atrocities.

This book is at times hilarious, heartfelt and evocative. Auslander tackles many of the “Holocaust issues” that today’s generation of Jews–who were not even alive at the time–are dealing with. Survivor’s guilt is just the tip of the iceberg. Irreverent? You bet. Insightful? Without a doubt. This is the book of the year.

Shalom Auslander. Hope: A Tragedy. New York: Riverhead Books, 2012. 978-1594488382. $26.95 292pp.

Heft

salomd — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 14:12:24 +0000

This wonderful second novel by Liz Moore weaves two stories simultaneously. As one would expect, the two intersect by the book’s conclusion. Arthur Opp is a retired academic living in Brooklyn. Not much to rave about there. However, Opp is 500 pounds and rarely, if ever, ventures out of his house, having his food and all else he needs delivered to his front door. When he asks a maid service to clean his house, Yolanda is sent. Pregnant, under-educated, in a lousy relationship, Yolanda is just what Arthur needs to get out of his huge shell. She actually, at one points, gets him to leave the house for a walk! Alongside Arthur’s story, we get the store of (Arthur) Kel Keller, a high school baseball fanatic (he is hoping for a spot with the Mets), whose mother Charlene is quite ill. Charlene’s path, it turns out, crossed with Arthur Opp’s years ago when she enrolled for one semester in college. Ever since, Arthur and Charlene have had a friendship and, more importantly, a rich correspondence.

When Charlene dies, Kel begins to investigate his own origins. Is he Arthur Opp’s son? Perhaps. The novel is well-written, humorous, and compassionate. A thoroughly enjoyable read that will keep you wanting a resolution until the final page. Reading this book compelled me to search out Moore’s debut novel, The Words of Every Song. It now sits on my “to-read” pile.

Liz Moore, Heft. New York: Norton, 2012. 352pp. 978-0393081503. 24.95.

The Belles Lettres Papers

salomd — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 17:36:41 +0000

I think I first read this slim novel almost 25 years ago when it was first published, but I’d forgotten how witty it was. Charles Simmons first published under a pen name but was later revealed as the editor of the NY Times Book Review. This novel is a rather scathing indictment of the New York City publishing world of the late 70s and early 80s. Though by now not relevant (with today’s use of technology to track bestsellers), The Belles Lettres Papers affords insight to the ego-driven world of book reviewing, particularly given the reviewers’ intentions to sway the reading public to read this book over that book.

Charles Simmons, The Belles Lettres Papers. New York, 1988. Out-of-print but widely available in used copies.