Dubious characters populate two thrillers
6:50 PM Fri, Nov 20, 2009 | Permalink | Write the first
comment
Email this author | Email this entry |
 |
Projo Arts Blog |
Books
|
|
comment
Email this author | Email this entry |
"Habits die hard," the title character of "Rainwater" (Simon & Schuster, 245 pages, $23.99) says early on. "But I wouldn't have done it if I'd known it would make you angry."
Fitting words to describe Sandra Brown's latest effort, since the modern master of thrillers steamy enough to fog up the windows departs from convention with a slight but equally masterful tale. This beautifully written period piece transports us to 1934 Depression-era Texas and a rooming house operated by one Ella Barron. Ella lives there along with her autistic son and a number of borders, soon to include one David Rainwater, who comes with a suitcase full of secrets -- including the fact that he's dying of inoperable cancer and just wants to live out his days in peace.
Nonetheless, Ella finds her sleepy life changed forever with Rainwater's arrival. First, he finds ways to reach her son, Solly, where all other efforts have failed. Then Rainwater begins to involve himself in the politics of the era, specifically the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation's efforts to "aid" indigent farmers by siphoning off and/or murdering their herds. His resolve in helping those rocked by financial ruin (eerily mirroring the plight of so many today) makes "Rainwater" a parable perfect to showcase Sandra Brown's newly displayed brilliance as a skilled lyricist as well as storyteller.
Entertaining bio brings James K. Polk to life6:00 PM Fri, Nov 20, 2009 | Permalink | Write the first comment
Email this author | Email this entry |
A COUNTRY OF VAST DESIGNS: James K. Polk, the Mexican War and the Conquest of the American Continent,
by Robert W. Merry.
Simon & Schuster. 576 pages. $30.
On Sept. 4, 1844, former Massachusetts Gov. Marcus Morton attended a large rally in Providence for the release of the embattled reformer Thomas Wilson Dorr, who was being held in state prison. The rally served the dual purpose of advocating for Dorr's freedom along with advancing the presidential candidacy of James K. Polk. Indeed, the tagline in many northern states in 1844 was "Polk, Dallas, and the Liberation of Dorr." Yet, while the lingering affects of the 1842 Dorr Rebellion in Rhode Island remained politically potent, the central issue in the campaign was the question of American expansionism.
Robert W. Merry, former editor and president of the Congressional Quarterly, has written an informative and entertaining biography of the most consequential one-term president in U.S. history.
By the end of Polk's presidency in 1849, the size of the United States had been increased by a third. Polk assumed office at a "critical moment in the Texas annexation matter," according to Merry. As president he "played a decisive role in bringing Texas into the American union," along with orchestrating "a complex and dangerous diplomatic and political dance that brought the most desirable expanses of Oregon into the Union."
November 19
Violence against women, girls get a global look7:00 AM Thu, Nov 19, 2009 | Permalink | Write the first comment
Email this author | Email this entry |
Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide,
by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn.
Knopf. 320 pages. $27.95.
Years ago, when I was director at a Providence shelter for battered women and children, we learned that a local official was demanding sex from women applying for federally subsidized housing. The young mother who alerted us feared for her family and for mothers who had been desperate enough to comply. She dropped her complaint.
Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn describe three realities taking a toll on girls and women: sex trafficking, gender-based violence, and maternal mortality. The Pulitzer Prize-winning authors, both New York Times journalists, write as a married couple who lived abroad with their children.
They interviewed and photographed women in Asia and Africa for this book, which is both harrowing and hopeful. They provide dozens of Internet resources and describe projects developed by indigenous activists. Despite horrific cruelty -- battering, burning, rape, genital mutilation, abduction, acid attacks, brothels, hunger, illiteracy, and lack of medical care -- victims are fighting back and inspiring others to join them.
November 18
Stories, quotes illustrate New England Patriots' years of struggle7:00 AM Wed, Nov 18, 2009 | Permalink | Write the first comment
Email this author | Email this entry |
“Then Belichick Said To to Brady…”: The Best New England Patriots Stories Ever Told,
by Jim Donaldson.
Triumph Books. 192 pages. $22.95.
Providence Journal sports columnist Jim Donaldson has covered and written about New England Patriots football since 1979, during which he has collected enough facts, stories and quotes to bring the full history of this intriguing NFL franchise to light.
In his recent book, "Then Belichick Said to Brady...," Donaldson puts the Patriots' success over the past decade into wider perspective. He writes about the humble beginnings of the franchise in 1959, when football took a back seat to baseball, basketball and hockey in New England. Football had gained traction in the college arena, but in those days, the professional team of choice for New England fans was the New York Giants.
Once established, the Patriots franchise worked through a number of challenges, including coaching changes, monetary issues, and most notably the lack of a permanent place to play. Donaldson, however, mines interviews with players from the early years, including Larry "Ike" Eisenhauer and Gino Cappelletti, to describe the team's gritty nature.
"The Patriots practiced in those days at a high school field in East Boston, near Logan Airport," he writes. Eisenhauer tells him: "We'd sit on milk crates and watch game films shown on sheets hung on the walls of the locker room." That's a far cry from the Patriots' top-notch facilities in Foxboro today.
November 16
American Relos keep moving on, from job to job10:49 AM Mon, Nov 16, 2009 | Permalink | Write the first comment
Email this author | Email this entry |
NEXT STOP, RELOVILLE: Life Inside America’s new Rootless Professional Class
by Peter T. Kilborn.
Times Books. 254 pages. $26.
Americans have always been more willing than most to move to improve their lives, but now there is a name for it: "Relo". Usually a noun but also a verb and adjective, it derives from "relocate." As the economy is increasingly globalized, there will be more and more Relos.
Peter Kilborn says that he never heard the word until 2004, although, as he said in a talk at Redwood Library in Newport, he probably was one himself. He grew up in Providence and after graduating from Trinity College worked two years at the The Providence Journal. But then he went to Paris, which led to a series of jobs at different places and for different employers -- though he spent most of his years with The New York Times. He and his wife now live in Washington.
Relos are competent and ambitious, often graduates of Midwestern universities, who realize that if they are to advance, they must be willing to move. "What you give up is community," one of them said. "It's hard to commit. Before you're in, you're thinking about exit strategies. You don't want to put up a lot of pictures. You're going to have to fill the holes in the walls."
November 13
The strange etchings of Giovanni Tiepolo7:00 AM Fri, Nov 13, 2009 | Permalink | Write the first comment
Email this author | Email this entry |
TIEPOLO PINK
by Roberto Calasso
Knopf. 288 pages. $40.
The Venetian Giovanni Tiepolo (1696-1770), father of nine, was celebrated for his luminous frescos on the ceilings and walls of villas, palaces, and churches, particularly in the New Residenz palace in Wurzburg above the grand staircase. His ceilings "become skies in which figures wheel and circle" in an "airy and intoxicating" composition, theatrical, operatic, mixing mythic and historical figures in a sumptuously lush crowd of angels and princes. He was also known for using "a cherry pink peculiarly Venetian . . . called Tiepolo pink."
Calasso praises Tiepolo's "excessive luminosity . . . an idolater of light," his masterworks "nobly decorated, and devoid of any obvious tensions." Tiepolo frequently paired a young voluptuous blonde woman, breast bared, with a vigorous, rapacious, often bearded and fearsome old man, surrounded by Orientals, an erotic entanglement that light illuminated. Suffering and salvation were not his subjects. The sparer, sterner, neo-classical "school" of painting that followed him eclipsed his work, and he slid into obscurity.
But Calasso's real subjects in this magnificently written and critically provocative book are Tiepolo's 10 capricci and 23 scherzi, etchings labeled as "jokes." These repetitive, obsessive pictures reveal groupings of strange characters in broad daylight and include altars, truncated pyramids, owls, satyrs, severed heads, the ever-present Orientals, flags, pennants, stakes and snakes. They are strange and stark and nothing like his frescos. What do they mean? What was Tiepolo up to?
November 12
Super villains spice up thrillers7:00 AM Thu, Nov 12, 2009 | Permalink | Write the first comment
Email this author | Email this entry |
Vince Flynn's latest devastatingly effective thriller, "Pursuit of Honor" (Atria, 432 pages, $27.99), opens in almost typical fashion. I say "almost" because we never actually see the "series of explosions [that tear] through Washington, D.C., killing 185 and wounding hundreds." The book starts after that Flynn staple has already occurred, setting the stage for a different, and more ambitious, tale.
With three of the terrorists responsible missing and the FBI hapless to catch them, super operative Mitch Rapp finds himself disillusioned with pretty much everything; especially his thankless superiors and including his younger protégé, Mike Nash, who seems suddenly reluctant to follow in his mentor's murderous footsteps.
No longer free to trample on the civil rights of his targets, this is Rapp, and Flynn, cast as anachronisms in a post-Bush/Cheney world where the U.S. Constitution is required reading. More Le Carre than Ludlum, with Rapp cast as the spy out in the cold. That is until higher powers determine that he's the best shot they've got to catch the al-Qaeda fugitives who are planning an even bigger attack.
In "Pursuit of Honor," though, he turns the action inward from acts of violence to the consequences wreaked upon those who must clean up the mess. Flynn, who redefined the thriller forever after 9/11, has redefines it again in equally spectacular fashion.
November 11
Looking at life in ancient Rome7:00 AM Wed, Nov 11, 2009 | Permalink | Write the first comment
Email this author | Email this entry |
The more one knows of Rome, the more one understands oneself. Four new books aid the discovery.
Alberto Angela's "A Day in the Life of Ancient Rome" (Europa, 392 pages, $16 paperback) is an account of a day in 115 A.D., and it is utterly delightful. An old hand at presenting complex information to the general public, Angela is an expert, voluble guide to the teeming city, dawn to dawn. Absorbing and unputdownable, his prose often makes the past eclipse the present, as when, on entering the forum, we are confronted by all that marble: "a colossal petrified cascade, arranged in descending terraces."
For a walk through the Forum both in space and history, choose David Watkins' "The Roman Forum" (Harvard, 279 pages, $19.95). Watkins makes us see the Forum as a site of transformation. There's always religion: the Forum has always been home to shrines, temples and churches, often built out of one another's remains, but in the Forum "nothing is what it seems to be on the surface." Indeed, modern archaeologists may only celebrate themselves rather than "the eternal vision of the original architect." There are many books on Rome, but few as deeply urbane.
November 10
Jewish angst, finely wrought7:00 AM Tue, Nov 10, 2009 | Permalink | Write the first comment
Email this author | Email this entry |
A FRIEND OF THE FAMILY,
by Lauren Grodstein.
Algonquin. 302 pages. $23.95.
Growing up gentile in the Catskill borscht belt, I was awed at the effortless wit of Jewish classmates whose nimble minds and tongues resembled Lauren Grodstein's. She fills this novel with an entire New Jersey enclave of rich Jews who enjoy limitless possibilities marinated in angst.
A family physician is seized with horror if he allows their only child to make his own choices. From the beginning, we know that the doctor has done something very bad. But what?
In the first sentence we find him exiled to the room their son is vacating over the garage. On the final page (it could be a moment later, since past and present consort wildly in his streams of consciousness), his son loads a U-Haul and drives out of their life: "The U-Haul has left a trail of blackish oil on our drive and down our street, and it could lead him back like Hansel if he needs to come back home."
Grodstein's superb storytelling entices us to keep plunging deeper despite dread of an ominous undertow: the doctor is still infatuated with his old girlfriend, now wife of his best friend and best friend of his wife. His own marriage is predictable, "comfortably quiet," relying on familiar subjects, "oldies-but-goodies . . . to keep the engine of our marital discourse lubed."
His persistent foreboding, his drive to analyze and control, lays bare his churning emotions. He cannot heal all his patients or bring back the dead or stop the rumors.
November 9
John Saul's latest gothic novel is his best7:00 AM Mon, Nov 09, 2009 | Permalink | Email this author | Email this entry |
HOUSE OF RECKONING
by John Saul
Ballantine. 291 pages. $26.
John Saul's 36th psycho-gothic novel is riveting, frightening, deliciously eerie and outright terrifying. I couldn't leave its compulsive and compelling plot, involving would-be orphans, a battle between a possible witch and a self-righteously rigid suburban crew of would-be Christians, hallucinations, voices, legends of an old insane asylum, strange murders, weird drawings, eviscerated dogs, sudden conflagrations and terrifically sympathetic main characters.
By page 18, Ed Crane, sinking into alcoholism because of his wife's recent death, pummels a guy at a bar to death, runs over his daughter, 14-year-old Sarah, on her bicycle, and goes to prison. A second dysfunctional family has to deal with Nick Dunnigan, another teenager, who suffers from voices in his head and hallucinations. His father seeks any excuse to get him re-committed to a hospital. We have entered Saul's "cacophony of demons."
Comments (1)
wrote, Gave up reading Saul years ago. Too many similarities in his books and he was churning them out too fast....
November 6
It's not so easy being a man7:00 AM Fri, Nov 06, 2009 | Permalink | Write the first comment
Email this author | Email this entry |
WHERE THE MONEY WENT: Stories,
by Kevin Canty.
192 pages. $28.95.
Society has created injunctions around its idea of masculinity: one is told to "take it like a man," "man up," or, most simply, "be a man." But in a culture that considers male issues to be as simple as a fist to the jaw, Kevin Canty's "Where the Money Went" shows us what it is to write like a man, and as one. Writing about men's issues is, at bottom, an analysis of the concept of domain -- where one person ends and another begins. And in the small, fleeting spaces that allow for overlap, there is fertile ground for Canty's talent.
Men lead precarious public lives: domination is tacitly expected, but is outwardly shunned. Among tenuous human connections, the ideal man shifts without severing. But how does one tread an invisible line? Canty analyzes domain through several male protagonists, and his concept finds its expression in real estate, a trade that figures heavily in the collection.
His symbolic representation of domain is the home -- the place where a man is insulated from a rough and oppressive world, but which keeps him segregated, alone inside himself. Canty's downtrodden heroes face this dilemma above all else.
November 5
Two mystery series still going strong7:00 AM Thu, Nov 05, 2009 | Permalink | Write the first comment
Email this author | Email this entry |
From the back alleys and boatyards of Vermont and Maine to the wild country and pub-riddled towns of Yorkshire: two new mysteries in successful series that show no signs of wear.
"The Price of Malice" (Minotaur, 308 pages, $24.99) by Archer Mayor returns us to Joe Gunther, head of the Vermont Bureau of Investigation, and his trusty if quirky sidekicks: blunt cop Willy Kunkle; impulsive Samantha Martens, who at the moment is Willy's lover and a good cop; and Lester Spinney, happily married, a father and built like a stork.
Mayor is good at bureaucratic infrastructure, internecine warfare and turf tantrums. This procedural moves from step to careful step, from the butchered body of a pedophile to a trailer park that houses nine people in one trailer, ranging from hookers to adolescent bullies and a mother who has at least three children, each from a different father.
November 3
A portrait of Peter Paul Rubens as master spy7:00 AM Tue, Nov 03, 2009 | Permalink | Write the first comment
Email this author | Email this entry |
MASTER OF SHADOWS: The Secret Diplomatic Career of the Painter
Peter Paul Rubens,
by Mark Lamster.
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. 316 pages. $29.95.
When people think of Peter Paul Rubens, the 17th-century Flemish painter, they probably conjure up images of rosy-cheeked, buxom women, proud courtiers, and grand historical scenes. In "Master of Shadows: The Secret Diplomatic Career of Peter Paul Rubens," Mark Lamster does nothing to dispel that familiar impression but a great deal to modify it.
In addition to being the foremost artist of his day, Rubens, it turns out, was a top-notch spy, shuttling between Flanders and Spain, England, and France on behalf of his Queen Isabella, in the seemingly impossible task of sorting out the baroque intricacies of the religious and political conflicts of the day. Among the cast of characters here are Cardinal Richelieu, Britain's James I and Charles I, King Philip of Spain, and assorted Hapsburgs and functionaries from the Holy Roman Empire.
The life and hard times of Molly Ivins7:00 AM Tue, Nov 03, 2009 | Permalink | Write the first comment
Email this author | Email this entry |
MOLLY IVINS: A Rebel Life,
by Bill Minutaglio and
W. Michael Smith.
Public Affairs. 323 pages. $26.95.
There's something about Molly: An eye-catching reporter with red hair, saucy, wide-apart eyes, an infectious laugh. . . . Molly went everywhere, making friends, enemies, and a devoted band of admiring colleagues. She was an intelligent original, a drinking, smoking, cursing charmer, who pushed the boundaries of journalistic wisecracking until her editors nudged her to move on. Like the time she wrote this rebuke of a Republican Congressman: "If his IQ slips any lower, we'll have to water him twice a day." Remarks like that gathered loyal readers and paved the way for Maureen Dowd.
Molly was Smith educated, with a junior year in Paris and an advanced degree from the Columbia School of Journalism. She was worldly, yet skillfully cultivated her down-home Southwestern story-telling image that reminded people of Mark Twain. She became a political raconteur, with a seamless delivery. She found her voice, first interpreting Lyndon Johnson, then the oil oligarchy, and finally the Bushes for her East Coast audience. Her insider's take on Texas culture and its influence on Washington fueled her career. Her speaking engagements multiplied. Molly was syndicated in 400 newspapers. Her books on Texas and the Bushes (Remember "Shrub"?) became bestsellers.
November 2
Classic Irving, with all the twists and turns7:00 AM Mon, Nov 02, 2009 | Permalink | Write the first comment
Email this author | Email this entry |
LAST NIGHT IN TWISTED RIVER
by John Irving.
Random House. 564 pages. $28.
Just as the season starts its stately march into the dark evenings of hibernation, John Irving gives us a wonderful, long read to carry us away. "Last Night In Twisted River" is Irving's 12th novel and it's just as satisfying as "The Cider House Rules," "A Prayer for Owen Meany," or "The World According to Garp."
"Twisted River" gives us everything Irving -- ornery characters, accidents of fate that echo down the generations, a labyrinthine plot line that grabs lightly at key moments in American history.
Irving follows the intertwined fates of three generations of men in one family, beginning with the cook in a logging camp on Twisted River in New Hampshire in the 1950s. A logging accident, a love triangle, an accidental shooting, and a vengeful ex set the stage for all that follows.
Categories
New comments
New photos
Authors
New posts
Projo blogs
Archives