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Holidays 2010: Ten Great Books
By
Published: Dec 03, 2010
Category:
Beyond Classification
The idea behind HeadButler.com is that just about every movie, book or music CD ever released is available on the Web — so why would a cultural concierge recommend only New Stuff, which is, all too often, dreck?
And yet, this year, I found 10 recently published books to give or get. And two are on a lot of "best of" lists. (Seekers of the overlooked, special or esoteric, worry not — I’ve got your back.)
My takeaway: Maybe this wasn’t as horrific a year in books as some smarties suggest.
Here you go….
Why the big fuss over Jonathan Franzen’s much praised, much debated novel? The people. Not the characters. The people. Men and women we come to know and care about, not because they’re so admirable but because they’re so real. A great deal happens in 562 pages, but I think the book boils down to this — the challenge of building a functional romantic partnership when you’re carrying the legacy of your flawed family and your country’s dishonest and exploitative culture. Again, I suspect this challenge isn’t unique to Patty and Walter Berglund. It’s mine, for sure. And, just maybe, yours.
The nominal topic here — how the film of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” came to be made, and why Audrey Hepburn was so crucial to that effort — concerns a book I don’t much like and a film I’ve never watched all the way through. The cool thing: you don’t have to care about any of that to love this book. You just have to like dish (and who doesn’t. You have to be interested in how things really work — in this case, how, in a time of prudery and censorship, two smart producers, one savvy director and a sharp screenwriter figured out how to take “a novel with no second act, a nameless gay protagonist, a motiveless drama and an unhappy ending and turn it into a Hollywood movie.” And you have to be interested in a book that has an idea at the center of the narrative — how Audrey Hepburn, a “good girl princess” as pure as Doris Day, helped to change the American distaste for “bad girls” with a single movie. And, just as much, with “a little black dress” that even the least mouseburger of a secretary could afford.
Once again Alan Furst serves up everything I hope to find in fiction and never expect to see in a thriller. I come away with fresh knowledge about pre-war Europe. And, without fail, Furst forces me to ponder a question that no other novelist consistently flings in my face: If an “enemy” were about to invade — and, very possibly, overrun — your country, what would you do? Here we meet a new hero, Costa Zannis.Who do you go to when Jews, smuggled out of Germany, are coming through the Balkans on their way to freedom in Turkey? Costa. Who can help the British extract one of their scientists from occupied Paris? Costa. Who dares to launch a romance with the gorgeous wife of the richest man in Salonika? Costa. This policeman in Salonika — he’s one great character.
A few years ago, Christopher Hirsheimer and Melissa Hamilton — professional foodies — decided to devote themselves to “good work and good ideas relating to the world of food.” They set up a studio near New Hope, Pennsylvania and began to self-publish exquisite seasonal cookbooks for the home cook. They shop at farm stands. They cook on ordinary stoves. And, best of all, their books are ruthlessly edited. Curated, really — each book presents fewer than 70 recipes.
This book has, as they say in show biz, everything. The highest echelons of Society in pre-World War I Paris. Nazi thugs and Austrian collaborators. A gay heir who takes refuge in Japan. Style. Seduction. Rothschild-level wealth. Two centuries of anti-Semitism. And 264 pieces of netsuke, the pocket-sized ivory-or-wood sculpture first made in Japan in the 17th century. It is on these netsuke that Edmund de Waal hangs his tale — or, rather, searches for it. Decades after he apprenticed as a potter in Japan, he has returned to research his mentor. In the afternoons, he makes pots. And, one afternoon a week, he visits his great-uncle Iggie, who owns a large vitrine, in which he displays his netsuke collection. An unlikely thriller, beautifully written.
The New York Times and I rarely agree when it comes to year-end “best” lists, but here is Joan Schenkar’s radically original Highsmith biography on both lists. Why? Well, it starts like this: She wasn’t nice. She was rarely polite. And no one who knew her well would have called her a generous woman. Why would you even think of reading almost 700 pages about such a monster? Because Highsmith wrote a half dozen books — among them Strangers on a Train, The Talented Mr. Ripley and a wonderfully sexy, though never graphic, lesbian novel called The Price of Salt — that will be read as long as readers like fiction that equally thrills and chills. Or maybe just because this was a train wreck of a life — and you just can’t turn away.
Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway’s book was, for me, the biggest eye-opener of the year. Their book takes us, in just 274 brisk pages, through seven scientific issues that called for decisive government regulation and didn’t get it, sometimes for decades, because a few scientists sprinkled doubt-dust in the offices of regulators, politicians and journalists. Suddenly these seven issue had two sides. And Congress and regulatory agencies often decided: Better not to do anything until we know more. How did this happen over and over again? Because some of the scientific “experts”who were on the payroll of tobacco companies in the anti-smoking fight, for example, turn out to be the very same scientists now working for oil and coal companies to create confusion about global warming.
Brian May — lead guitarist of Queen — went on to earn a PhD. from Imperial College, London. He wrote some learned books, and then he took lifelong interest in stereoscopic photography and produced a picture-and-text book that is at once a historical chronicle and a work of art. (The book comes in a slipcase; in a separate folder, you get a 3-D viewer.) The pictures are of small English village in a magical, soon-to-vanish 1800s moment. The book has about 80 scenes, some in color. Intelligently, the left hand page offers a large single image. On the right, you’ll find two panels of that image. Slip the page into the 3-D viewer, let your eyes relax — and enter a world that’s 150 years old.
If you read “The Liar’s Club,” you know Mary Karr is one sassy Texan. In this memoir, she marries a tall, Harvard-educated poet, has a son, and, right there, when it looks if she has everything, she starts downing a bottle of Jack Daniels a day. It isn’t as if she doesn’t recognize the trouble she’s in. Alcohol flows through her family history — her father, she’s written, could start a fight sitting alone on the front porch. “Lit” is about many things: the resolution of her relationship with her mother and father, her struggle for recognition as a writer, her inability to unfreeze her marriage. But mostly it’s about alcohol and faith — about an intellectually arrogant woman who’s too proud to surrender and too smart to believe. And she does both. Magnificently.
Keith Richards. Wild man. Broken tooth, skull ring, earring, kohl eyes — he’s Cpt. Jack Sparrow’s father, lurching though life as if it’s a pirate movie, ready to unsheath his knife for any reason, or none. Got some blow, some smack, a case of Jack Daniels? Having a party? Dial Keith. Surprise: his book is much better than even the greatest Rolling Stones fan dared to hope. And in this 547-page memoir he wrote with James Fox, he serves up irresistible stories like his guitar riffs — in your face, nasty, confrontational, rich, smart, and, in the end, unforgettable.
