Baseball Days

On Tuesday I attended what will almost certainly be my last Dodgers game for a long time. It wasn't one of the better games I've been to. Perhaps because they were playing the Mets, the stands were more crowded than usual. Halfway into a sloppy game the distractable Dodger fans devoted their energies to Thundersticks, shouting matches with transplanted New Yorkers, and the dreaded wave. Hideo Nomo didn't have his stuff, and the Dodgers were plagued by timid, sloppy baserunning. There was a bit of history, though, as Mike Piazza hit his 351st home run, tying Hall-of-Famer Carlton Fisk for the most career home runs by a catcher. The ball was passed down through the bleachers and dropped over the wall to left fielder Dave Roberts who tossed it in to the ballboy. After the game Piazza said that he was happy to get the ball back and that he looks forward to getting his hands on the one that breaks the record. Over the last three years I've been to twenty or so ballgames. It became especially easy after I moved into my current house. At around six, I would hop in my car and drive north on Alvarado to Sunset. I'd park out front of Little Joy Jr. and stop in for a beer and meet whoever was joining me that evening. Then we'd walk back out into the sun and up the hill to Chavez Ravine, purchasing tickets on the way from the cadre of scrambling scalpers. Los Angeles, while better than some places, isn't known as a great baseball town, and the Dodgers have certainly underperformed since I've been around, but I did have some moments at the Stadium that were truly sublime. If you go to enough games, you're bound to. There was opening day 2003 when we paid 40 bucks to a scalper to sit way up in the top deck behind home plate. Fighter jets flew low over the field and the noise of the sellout crowd mingled with the leftover roar of the engines. Then an Army transport plane dipped low into view and a half a dozen paratroopers leaked out of the side of the plane. As they drifted down they emitted colored smoke, and the trails intertwined as the troopers landed on the ballfield. Then there was a rare damp day in May last year. The Dodgers were playing the Padres or the Brewers or somesuch lowly team. The scalpers were a forlorn lot, knowing that their profits would be slim. My purchase of a field level seat felt like charity. The Stadium was quieter that night and mostly empty, only the diehards had bothered to come out for this meaningless game. A collective calm settled over the whole place, folks in windbreakers with blankets on their lap mesmerized by the crack of the bat, the delicate arc of the ball, and pop as it hit the fielders glove in the misty twilight. Perhaps, the most memorable though, was May 5th, 2002. The Cubs were in town and my friend Matt, an artist who now lives in San Francisco, joined me in the cheap seats for a packed Sunday afternoon game. Cubs fans were liberally sprinkled among us and several fights erupted. Every inning or so another spectator would be escorted from the stadium owing to his disorderly conduct. Neither the game nor its outcome were memorable, the stadium was so full of life. Afterwards the PA announcer Mike Carlucci invited everyone onto the field for music and fireworks in celebration of Cinco de Mayo. As the stands emptied and people spilled across the outfield, the loudspeakers blared Mexican rolas interspersed with several American patriotic anthems. Matt and I spread out in center field, and up above, a fantastic fireworks show enveloped the heavens. An inebriated fellow Dodger fan stood behind us during the festivities and proudly belted out every word to every song, switching languages effortlessly. Even after the music had fallen quiet and the fireworks had faded from the sky, he wasn't ready to leave, "Play some Puerto Rican music!" He screamed to no one in particular, "play some Puerto Rican music!"

And to accompany my little ode to Dodgers baseball, I thought I should mention Roger Angell, whose writing about baseball is one of the reasons I love the game. Two of his classic collections have recently been released in spiffy new editions: Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion and The Summer Game.

- C. Max Magee @ 1:14 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Ask a Book Question: The Seventeenth in a Series (Cookbooks and the New Wave)

Ms. Millions writes in with this culinary question:

I came across this article in the NYTimes Dining + Wine section with a book mention, Know anything about it? Got any other great cookbook recommendations? I know Edan does..;] PS- Happy Birthday to me ;]

As Ms. Millions certainly knows, I am no master of haute cuisine -- I once made gazpacho from scratch, but it took me six hours -- but I do have a sweet tooth for food writing. And it is in this capacity that I first encountered the inspiration for the article mentioned above, Ferran Adria. If memory serves, there is an essay in one of the two Jeffrey Steingarten books, The Man Who Ate Everything or It Must've Been Something I Ate, in which Steingarten makes a pilgrimage to Adria's outlandish restaurant, El Bulli, outside Barcelona. Or maybe it was Calvin Trillin in his book, Feeding a Yen; I can't remember (I'm a glutton for food books). At any rate, Adria is a fascinating character, part mad scientist part celebrity chef. He spends six months out of the year in a lab in Barcelona devising new technologies to push the limits of cooking. He creates foams and gelatins using unexpected ingredients and he layers flavors and temperatures in his dishes in disconcerting ways. In the book Chef's Night Out, in which celebrity chefs visit one another's restaurants, Todd English (whose latest restaurant is on the Queen Mary 2) compares Adria to Willy Wonka, and Nancy Silverton of LA's own Campanile describes eating at El Bulli as "more of an artistic encounter." Adria is so out there that even the most adventurous eaters find themselves bewildered by his creations. Nonetheless, Matt Lee and Ted Lee of the Times decided to throw a dinner party using Adria's techniques. As a guide, they use the El Bulli cookbook, a book that sounds remarkable but appears to be very difficult to get a hold of. After searching around, it doesn't seem as though there are any books that delve into Adria's techniques, but I was able to find a couple of books that appear to blend traditional Spanish ingredients with contemporary methods. In The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen Paula Wolfert applies the recent "slow food" trend to Spanish cooking, as well as other Mediterranean cuisines. And El Farol is a book full of contemporary and traditional Spanish recipes from a restaurant of the same name in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Hope this helped. Happy birthday Ms. Millions! (If any cookbook mavens out there have a hot cookbook recommendation, don't hesitate to leave a comment)

- C. Max Magee @ 1:12 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Hubert Selby Jr.

Hubert Selby Jr., a controversial American writer, has died. He was best known for his unsparing look at Brooklyn's seamy underbelly, Last Exit to Brooklyn, a landmark book that was widely praised but also spawned obscenity trials. His career reached another apogee when his novel Requiem for a Dream, a chilling portrait of addiction, was turned into a movie by director Darren Aronofsky. Here's the obit from the Times.

Also, check out the web only interview with Edward P. Jones at the New Yorker. He talks about Washington, DC, his life, and his upcoming collection of stories. An excerpt: "One of the things that I found out when I did go to college is that people had a very narrow idea of Washington. They thought it was basically the government and the Supreme Court and all of that, and they didn't know that there were people who had lived there for generations and generations and had really almost nothing to do with the government. That was certainly my mother's case. She came from the South and was a dishwasher in a French restaurant that just happened to be about a block or so from the White House. Around that time in college, I also came upon James Joyce's "Dubliners," and I admired what he had done for the people in Dublin--just everyday, good people. I took a creative-writing course, and I began to think, well, maybe one day I would like to do the same thing for the people of Washington that Joyce had done for the people in Dublin."

- C. Max Magee @ 11:58 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

For Fans of the Funnies

I discovered the other day that an ambitious project to publish the complete run of Charles Shulz's seminal comic, Peanuts, has begun. The books are very attractive and they have rounded up some notable folks to pen the introductions. The first volume, which covers 1950-1952, includes an introduction by Garrison Keillor and is already in book stores. Volume two (1953-1954) will be released this fall with an introduction by Walter Cronkite. According to the publisher, Fantagraphics, the 25 book series will span the full 50 year run of the comic and the books will be released at a rate of two books per year. When it is all said and done, the collection (along with the introductions within) should provide an interesting look into the second half of the twentieth century in America.

- C. Max Magee @ 11:56 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Books As Newsmakers

My travels to the East coast last weekend swept away any doubt about the importance of the current wave of bestselling books about the Bush administration. In airport lounges, on planes, and in the New York City subways people everywhere are getting their news, not from the Times or from the weekly newsmagazines, but from a handful of books by people who enjoyed unfettered access to the current administration. I especially noticed an abundance of copies of Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack as well as a handful of copies of Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies, (which, at the moment, come in at number one and number six respectively on Amazon's Top 100). The content of these books is interesting, but so is the phenomenon behind them. According to many who have been following this trend, we are in uncharted territory. In the Times, David K. Kirkpatrick explains why all of this is unprecedented and suggests that the administration's vigilance over the information that ends up in newspapers and magazines has caused a spillover into books. Here is the article.

- C. Max Magee @ 11:54 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

New Books and Book News

Some quick observations: Bob Woodward's new book Plan of Attack is selling as fast as I have seen any book fly off the shelf in my two years at the book store: faster than Hillary and approaching Harry Potter levels. One time Millions contributor Kaye Gibbons has a new novel out called Divining Women. Early reviews are mostly good. On the other hand, the review that New York Times' "Madame" Michiko Kakutani gave Alice Walker's new book, Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart, is just about the most brutal I have ever seen in that paper. View the carnage here

In Millions news, I'm heading to New York tonight. I'm in a wedding this weekend and there are other East Coast errands to run, so I probably won't be blogging much, if at all. I will, however, be checking the comments here as well as my email. I don't know how special this makes me, but I have been asked to be a trial user for Google's mega-hyped webmail service, GMail, so if you are curious about how well it works, feel free to drop me a line.

- C. Max Magee @ 1:15 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

News Flash

Oprah and her minions must read my blog because a little bird told me that her next book club selection is a book that also happens to be on my reading queue. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is a somewhat forgotten classic by Carson McCullers. From what I've heard, the book resembles To Kill a Mockingbird and several other works of fiction by Southern women authors. And now it will be a bestseller. If you are one of those people who gets annoyed about the Oprah logo, hurry and get one before they run out of unbesmirched copies.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:51 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

What Makes a Bookstore?

I met several Chicago natives while I was there last weekend, and as we discussed the city's various merits and drawbacks, the subject of bookstores came up. The Chicago natives, being aspiring reporters, astutely asked me what I look for in a "good" bookstore, and why a chain store is unlikely to bear this mantle.

When it comes to hanging out, it's hard to beat the chains. Your nearest Barnes and Noble probably has dozens of plush chairs and couches where you can sit for as long as you want. The stores are vast wide open spaces with a controlled climate and a bit of piped in music wafting just overhead. The shopper can make a day of it, grabbing a snack and a coffee from the cafe and lounging through the uncrowded weekday afternoon. Stay as long as you want, they won't tell you to leave until they're closing down for the night. If you want to kill an afternoon, it's hard to beat Barnes and Noble, likewise if you need to pick up a specific title, but don't expect to walk away with anything unexpected from these forays. Don't plan for a literary discovery.

And therein lies the problem with the chains, they are designed not to surprise you. Their displays will, as decreed from the home office, contain a calculated mix of bestsellers assembled from the major lists. The information that they disseminate is predetermined by prevailing tastes; they are not, themselves, tastemakers. And yet, if there is any more important generator of tastes, trends, and shared knowledge in the commercial world than the bookstore, then I don't know about it. Nonetheless, there are very few bookstores that serve this purpose. And that, precisely, is what I am looking for.

To my mind, a good bookstore will have on display the "important" books not just the bestselling books, though there will always be bestsellers among those important books. For example, The Da Vinci Code is important because it is a cultural phenomenon, but not simply because it sits at number one on the Times bestsellers. There are all sorts of reasons why a book can be important. The idea is that one should be able to walk into the bookstore and be able to grasp, based upon which books are on display and based upon conversations with staff and fellow customers, what matters at that moment both in the wider world and in the neighborhood, from Presidential exposes to burgeoning local talent. At a good bookstore you can place your confidence in the people who run the place.

At Barnes and Noble you can get any book you want if you can find it in the vast fluorescent retail gymnasium, but at a good indie, the kindly book clerk will take his favorite book off the shelf and hand it to you, as if a gift. Most cities of any size have at least one of these good bookstores, and thanks to some recommendations that I have already received, I'm confident that I'll find what I'm looking for in Chicago.

- C. Max Magee @ 1:23 PM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

Review: The Known World by Edward P. Jones

The Known World feels like a book that took a long time to write. The writing proceeds at a slow but churning pace. Jones meticulously ties each character to one another, to the land, to the curious circumstances of the "peculiar institution" of slavery. We are taught in school that slavery was a black and white affair, but Jones takes great pains to describe a human landscape where such distinctions are blurry: the most powerful man in Manchester County, William Robbins, dotes upon the two children he has fathered with his slave, Philomena; Oden, the Indian, exaggerates his cruelty towards blacks to maintain his tenuous superiority; and Henry Townsend, the gifted young black man at the center of this novel, acquires a plantation full of slaves from which discord flows, imperceptibly at first. The lesson is the messiness of slavery made real by the vivid lives of each character. Over the course of the novel, Jones sketches out each character, from birth to death, using deft flashbacks and flash-forwards that are scattered throughout like crumbs and give the book a marvelous depth. In this sense, the book reminded me of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. The book ends before the Civil War begins, and so the triumph of good over evil is not allowed to mitigate the brutal picture of slavery that Jones paints. Perhaps because it was so assiduously researched, this novel feels like history and it feels like life. Here's hoping that Jones' next one doesn't take ten years to write.

- C. Max Magee @ 11:31 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Chicago Bound

I'm heading to Chicago this afternoon to scope the place out. This summer, after Miss Millions and I get hitched, we're moving to Chicago where I'll be attending the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern. Chicago will be a big change for us... the weather alone is a little daunting, but I'm excited about getting to know a new city, and I will do my best to keep The Millions going while I'm in school. In fact, one of the things that keeps the Millions going is the great book stores in LA where I can keep track of the latest books and even meet authors from time to time. I happened upon Golden Rule Jones, which will keep me informed of readings and other literary events, but I need to find a good book store that can be my home base in Chicago, preferably somewhere on the North side of the city, since that's where we'll be living. So, I probably won't be blogging for the next few days, but I will be checking back here. I'm hoping that those of you with knowledge of Chicago will leave some bookstore recommendations in the comments area so that I can check them out. Thanks guys!

- C. Max Magee @ 1:46 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Cops and Doctors and Critics

One of the guests on Fresh Air today was former cop named Edward Conlon, a Harvard grad and fourth generation NYPD officer who used to pen an anonymous column in the New Yorker. Now he has a new book called Blue Blood in which he recounts his life as a beat cop. It looks to be a literary take on macabre subject matter. Speaking of which, Ian McEwan, most recently the author of Atonement, a book adored by both readers and critics, has revealed some details about his forthcoming book. According to this Reuters story, it appears as though McEwan will return to the more visceral subject matter of his earlier novels with a book that centers on the life of a brain surgeon. He will finish it "within months." This new McEwan book will almost certainly be reviewed by the New York Times Book Review, where, after much skeptical anticipation, Sam Tanenhaus has been appointed as editor. As beatrice.com pointed out yesterday, some in the literary world are skipping the grace period and sticking with the skepticism, cf. David Kipen's San Francisco Chronicle piece. This changing of the guard, you may remember, was a topic a few months back here at The Millions.

- C. Max Magee @ 3:26 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Quick Notes

Arts & Letters Daily links to a Washington Post article by a former Amazon.com employee, James Marcus, picking up on February's story about a programming glitch at Amazon.ca. He gives us a little insider perspective on the customer review phenomenon, but perhaps more interesting for Amazon-watchers is the prospect of his upcoming book: Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.Com Juggernaut chronicling the early days of the online superstore through the internet bust. This will likely be an interesting portrait of the dot-com era.

Also at aldaily.com, a link to a review of Kingsley Amis' comic masterpiece Lucky Jim in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the book's publication. Believe the hype, this book is fantastic.

Folks in Los Angeles, and probably most big cities, have probably noticed the proliferation of stencil and paste-up graffiti appearing on sidewalks and walls. The images range from blatant advertisements (usually for bands) to beguiling and intriguing symbols. The British artist Tristan Manco has collected these odd hybrid art forms into a couple of good-looking volumes, Stencil Graffiti and the soon to be released Street Logos. Here are some images from the first book: Stencil Graffiti

I've added The Clerk's Tale by Spencer Reece to the Reading Queue, and I'm almost done with The Known World by Edward P. Jones. It is fantastic.

- C. Max Magee @ 1:37 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Campus Censorship

Last fall, a student at Academy of Art University in San Francisco was expelled for writing an extremely violent short story for a creative writing class. In the fallout, the instructor was dismissed after it was revealed that she had assigned the class to read a somewhat graphic story by David Foster Wallace prior to the incident. At the end of March the San Francisco Chronicle broke the story and incited a furor among a number of the country's literary luminaries. I first heard about this at Scott McCloud's blog (scroll down to 4/4). McCloud had heard about the scandal from Neil Gaiman (author of American Gods and many others), who had been the recipient of an email sent out by Daniel Handler AKA Lemony Snicket, the children's author, after Handler was barred from speaking at the Art Academy. Handler's forceful ejection was recounted here, where we also see that Dave Eggers and Michael Chabon are going on the attack. All of which brings us to today's opinion piece in the New York Times, in which Pulitzer prizewinner (for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay) Chabon muses in a pleasantly obscure way about being a teenager under a headline that, rather oddly, references Jonathan Lethem's most recent novel. So, what does this all mean? Here's my prediction: Team American Contemporary Writers will place enough pressure on the Academy of Art that it will be forced to issue a public apology. The fired instructor will get hired at another liberal-leaning university, and the expelled student will sign a lucrative book deal on his way to becoming the next Bret Easton Ellis. Most folks who are commenting on this believe that it is indicative the American fear of the teenager that lingers from Columbine. That is most definitely true, but it is also indicative of the fact that the Academy of Art University in San Francisco faculty and administration don't seem to be very adept at handling a minor crisis, nor are they particularly well-read. Gaiman mentions this on his blog: "according to Daniel Handler they got a letter of remonstrance from Salman Rushdie, and didn't recognize the name," and according to the Chronicle story, "[the Academy of Art administration was] none too pleased that the instructor was teaching Wallace's story. "Nobody had ever heard of him," [the instructor] said. "In fact, they kept calling him George Foster Wallace.'' (Thanks to my friend Brian for forwarding the Times op-ed to me this morning.)

- C. Max Magee @ 6:54 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Ombudsman

Arts and Letters Daily recently linked an article from the National Journal that takes stock of an interesting development at the New York Times. In the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal and a good amount of internal and external strife about wavering journalistic standards, the Times has appointed an ombudsman, a position more commonly found at campus newspapers than at the world's most important dailies. This ombudsman happens to be an author and journalist, Daniel Okrent, whom I admire for his baseball book Nine Innings and who was recently named a Pulitzer finalist for his book, Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center. His columns bring an impressive amount of transparency to a very powerful newsroom, and I suggest everyone read them before Okrent's fellow employees stage a coup and kick him out. The most recent column can be found here.

- C. Max Magee @ 5:46 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Ask a Book Question: The Sixteenth in a Series (Comics and Cognition)

Tom writes:

First of all, thanks for suggesting Our Band Could Be Your Life. I am about halfway through and its great. My question is unrelated. It is: are there any books that attempt to bring together cognitive science and comic books in a similar style to Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics? If not, do you know of any more general books about the cross-section of literature and cognitive science? I am looking for something that discusses the scientific specifics while remaining readable and interesting. Thanks.

I held a grudge against cognitive science for a long time because of a really bad class I took my freshman year of college. My professor spent much of the semester showing us home movies of her toddler learning how to talk, and I finished up with a bad grade and no knowledge of cognition at all. Now, if Scott McCloud had taught the class, I might be singing a different tune. Understanding Comics is a very special, and peculiar, book. For those who haven't read it (I have delved into it here and there, but I will read it all the way through sometime soon), McCloud writes a comic that teaches us how we perceive comics as a storytelling medium. It's very meta. The literary equivalent would be a novel about how and why we understand novels. Because of how peculiar McCloud's book is, it doesn't seem likely that there are any comparable books which take either comics or literature as the subject matter. There may, however, be a couple of books that expand upon the base of knowledge provided in Understanding Comics

McCloud provides a bibliography at the end of Understanding Comics. From among the books he lists as source, the most useful for your purposes seems likely to be Comics & Sequential Art by Will Eisner. Eisner is considered to be the father of the graphic novel, and this book, the textbook for a course he teaches, discusses the principles of graphic storytelling. This book will go much more into detail from an artists standpoint than McCloud's book does, but the central idea remains tapping into the human capacity to understand a visual narrative.

I was very intrigued by the idea of a book that is a melding of both literature and cognitive science and I suspect that there is some dense novel out there that wrestles with this idea (or perhaps Borges has it covered), but I was also curious to see if there is any readable academic literature on the topic. After doing some research, there is indeed a lot of UN-readable literature on the subject, but one slim volume did catch my eye. Metaphors We Live By was written by a linguistics professor and a philosophy professor. The book explains how metaphors, one of the more expressive aspects of language, can tell us a lot about the human mind. It certainly seems rather dry compared to McCloud, but it might prove useful as another perspective on the intricacies of human creativity.

- C. Max Magee @ 3:07 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Baseball Begins

I went to my first baseball game of the season the other day, and it made me hope that I manage to get into some of the baseball books on my queue this summer. Jonathan Yardley also has the baseball bug as he reviews a forgotten baseball memoir in his "Second Readings" series. Jim Brosnan was a relatively unknown pitcher with Reds who just happened to be deft with a pen. His book, The Long Season, was the first to break the code of silence and look behind the clubhouse door at a world that is equal parts bliss and daily drudgery. Brosnan's book paved the way for a more famous baseball memoir, Jim Bouton's Ball Four, which did not spare the reader the vulgarities of professional sports.

- C. Max Magee @ 11:52 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Punctuationally Speaking

There are two types of people in this world: (Segment One) people who adhere, as a point of pride, to every last comma and period of the laws of punctuation, and then there the people who just don't have the time (Segment Two) and, frankly, are a little tired of hearing about these numerous and arcane rules that are supposedly all that separates us from the animals. Bearing in mind that Segment One would be offended that anyone might suggest that punctuation rules are not self-evident and that Segment Two will tell you to blow it out your ear, a book aimed at teaching the populace the in and outs of punctuation doesn't seem likely to be a blockbuster. Yet just such a book was a huge seller in England last year. Are the Brits crazy or are we Americans missing out on the pleasurable nuances of punctuation? We're about to find out. Next week, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss comes out, and its current sales ranking of 6 at Amazon indicates that it will indeed be a success on this side of the Atlantic. And the New York Times seems to like it, which can't hurt. The success of this book will cement the notion that Americans appreciate this British brand of book that delivers dull subject matter contained in a humorous package and prove that the big sales of last year's most delightfully useless British book, Schott's Original Miscellany, was not a fluke. (I hope that I punctuated everything correctly in that post.)

- C. Max Magee @ 1:33 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Pulitzer Followup

The Washington Post has a good roundup of all the books that were recognized by the Pulitzer judges yesterday. Also, it turns out that Franz Wright, who received the poetry Pulitzer yesterday, is the son of the late poet James Arlington Wright, who won the Pulitzer in 1972 for his Collected Poems.

- C. Max Magee @ 4:33 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Pulitzer Day!

I'm back from Vegas just in time for the announcement of the winners of the Pulitzer Prize. Here are the winners and finalists in all of the book categories:

NOVEL

• The Known World by Edward P. Jones Winner!
• American Woman by Susan Choi
• Evidence of Things Unseen by Marianne Wiggins

DRAMA:

• I Am My Own Wife by Doug Wright Winner!
• Man from Nebraska by Tracy Letts
• Omnium Gatherum by Theresa Rebeck and Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros

HISTORY:

• A Nation under Our Feet : Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration by Steven Hahn Winner!
• They Marched Into Sunlight: War and Peace Vietnam and America October 1967 by David Maraniss
• Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center by Daniel Okrent

BIOGRAPHY OR AUTOBIOGRAPHY:

• Khrushchev: The Man and his Era by William Taubman Winner!
• Isaac Newton by James Gleick
• Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work by Hayden Herrera

POETRY:

• Walking to Martha's Vineyard by Franz Wright Winner!
• Middle Earth by Henri Cole
• Eyeshot by Heather McHugh

GENERAL NON-FICTION:

• Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum Winner!
• Rembrandt's Jews by Steven Nadler
• The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace with America's Military by Dana Priest

I have to commend the Pulitzer committee; they really got it right this time. I actually started reading The Known World today because it's the selection for my book club. I'll be able to add my two cents at the end of the week, but based on the lavish praise this book received from critics and readers, there's no doubt it was deserving. Also, the more I hear about Jones, the more I like him. Check out this excerpt from an AP story announcing his victory:

The Pulitzer was a shot of energy on an otherwise down day for Jones, author of a previous book, the acclaimed story collection "Lost in the City." He was feeling so ill Monday he didn't bother at first to answer his phone. He also was in the middle of moving from his longtime home in Arlington, Va., because of noisy upstairs neighbors.

"This (award) should give me strength to finish up tomorrow," said Jones, who next week expects to move into Washington, D.C

I think it's a particularly writerly trait to be distracted from the demands of the outside world by your inner concerns. As for the other winners, I was thrilled to see Anne Applebaum lauded for her truly astonishing book, Gulag. I'm glad that the Pulitzer did not stick to its bias of rewarding books with American themes in selecting a book that is of universal importance and that greatly expands our knowledge and understanding of what was until now a hidden part of 20th century history. For similar reasons, I was also happy to see Taubman's biography of Khrushchev get the prize. Daniel Okrent, another favorite author of mine, was named a finalist, as well. All in all, I have no complaints.

- C. Max Magee @ 1:51 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Viva Las Vegas

I won't be posting again until Monday because I'm leaving for Las Vegas tomorrow. I've got plenty of books to read right now (and anyway, I'm not sure if I'll do much reading), but I was wondering what I might pick up if I wanted to do some Vegas-themed reading. The obvious choice is Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a book that I read years ago and loved, though I prefer some of HST's other books. But, no, that's far to cliched. Or I could read John O'Brien's Leaving Las Vegas, the devastating novel of alcoholism that was turned into an Oscar-winning triumph for Nicolas Cage, but that would be far, far too depressing. A little research reveals that Larry McMurtry wrote a book set in Vegas called The Desert Rose. I've never read McMurtry, so this might be a reason to start. But, as usual, I have a hankering for some non-fiction as well. There happens to be a good, recent book about Vegas called The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America by Roger Morris and Sally Denton, which might help explain why we are drawn to this desert fantasyland like so many moths to the flame.

- C. Max Magee @ 1:06 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post