Sunday, December 31, 2006

Tom Wolfe's ghost in the machine

The political philosopher Eduardo Velásquez is the author of the forthcoming book, A Consumer’s Guide to the Apocalypse: why there is no cultural war in America and why we will perish nonetheless.

His writing first appeared here on the blog with, "Is Fight Club philosophy masquerading as a thrill ride?" Then he shared his insights into “Quantum Physics Meets Quantum Ethics," an excursion into "knowledge, ignorance and Socratic wisdom in Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen.”

And now I'm delighted to run an adapted essay from Velásquez's “Tom Wolfe’s Ghost in the Machine: Neuroscience, Consciousness and the Soul in I Am Charlotte Simmons,” in Shenandoah (forthcoming):
Tom Wolfe is a seer with powers to make his prophecies come true. Such is the nature of the literary mind. In 1996 Forbes magazine published an essay of Wolfe’s entitled “Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died” (reissued and edited for Hooking Up). If we are fascinated by the digital web that links us all in cyberspace, says Wolfe, just wait. Within “ten years, by 2006 (2010 in Hooking Up), the entire digital universe is going to be seem like pretty mundane stuff compared to a new technology that right now is but a mere glow radiating from a tiny number of American and Cuban (yes, Cuban) hospitals and laboratories” (pp. 89-90). The revolutionary technology is “called brain imaging, and anyone who cares to get up early and catch a truly blinding twenty-first-century dawn will want to keep an eye on it” (p. 90). The dawn came and went. It is a new day and a new world. We now bask in the noonday sun.

Brain imaging “refers to techniques for watching the human brain as it functions, in real time,” Wolfe tells us. Invented for medical diagnoses, of “far greater importance is that it may very well confirm, in ways too precise to be disputed, certain theories about ‘the mind,’ ‘the self,’ ‘the soul,’ and ‘free will.’” This developing science of the brain and nervous system, says Wolfe, “is on the threshold of a unified theory that will have an impact as powerful as that of Darwinism a hundred years ago” (p. 90). Speaking of a “soul” will soon sound as absurd as speaking of witches and warlocks.

The neuroscientific view emerges in concert with (and may even draw sustenance from) the “most statement in all of modern philosophy: Nietzsche’s ‘God is dead.’” According to Wolfe, Nietzsche’s is not a statement of atheism, though an atheist he was. Nietzsche’s simply brings “news of an event.” The news is that “educated people no longer believed in God, as a result of the rise of rationalism and scientific thought, including Darwinism, over the preceding 250 years” (p. 98). Nietzsche is by no means sanguine about this fact. In his autobiographical Ecce Homo he predicts, Wolfe says, “that the twentieth century would be a century of ‘wars such as have never happened on earth,’ wars catastrophic beyond all imagining.” Unable to surrender our guilt to God, we turn our revenge on one another. This is Hobbes’s “war of all against all.” The age of total war coincides with the “’total eclipse of all values.’” If we doubt Nietzsche’s predictive powers, Wolfe invites us to consider the “world wars of the twentieth century and the barbaric brotherhoods of Nazism and Communism. Ecce vattes! Ecce vates! Behold the prophet! How much more proof can one demand of a man’s powers of prediction?” (p. 99).

And thus we come to Wolfe's own prophesy:

Thereupon, in the year 2010 or 2030 (2006 or 2026, Forbes), some new Nietzsche will step forward to announce: ‘The self is dead’ – except that being prone to the poetic, like the Nietzsche I, he will probably say: ‘The soul is dead.’ He will say that he is merely bringing the news, the news of the greatest event of the millennium: ‘The soul, that last refuge of values, is dead, because educated people no longer believe that it exists (p. 107).

I wonder if the poetic prophet is Wolfe himself. Roughly ten years removed from the Forbes essay, Wolfe delivers a bold and daring book that depicts the consequences of the death of the soul and God, I Am Charlotte Simmons. Wolfe tells the story of a young teenage high school graduate from Sparta, North Carolina. The novel chronicles Charlotte Simmons’ journey from a small Southern town where the old virtues of religion, patriotism, austerity and self-command reign to one of America’s elite universities, a place like most elite universities in America that conservatives say are steeped in “political correctness.” The emphasis Wolfe places on “educated persons” points us to the modern university as the novel’s proper setting. This is the arena where intellectual movements take root and are disseminated among rising generations. Intellectual movements do not emerge or take hold in a vacuum. The university is the arena where the young put their newly acquired lessons into practice. Charlotte may have arrived at the fictitious Dupont University with a soul. But after less than a year, the stifling social and intellectual atmosphere asphyxiates that original breath of life that is the source of moral integrity and emancipates her latent lawlessness. Her nascent moral and intellectual longings crushed, Charlotte emerges at the end of the novel animated by little more than a Nietzschean “will to power,” courting recognition for its own sake, appearance taking the place of moral substance.

It would be reasonable to conclude that I Am Charlotte Simmons is no more than a translation of the essay into novel form. Wolfe himself gives evidence of this. Within the first hundred pages (what counts for an introduction in Wolfe’s terms), we learn that Charlotte is enrolled in a course taught by Dr. Lewin entitled “Modern French Novel: From Flaubert to Houellebecq.” Lewin assigned Madame Bovary for this day’s discussion. Flaubert’s novel is arguably among the first Modern novels, a depiction of a nascent Modernity that ends in suicide. Recourse to Flaubert is no accident. Nor to Houellebecq. Let us listen in.

“’For a moment,’” Lewin begins, “’let’s consider the very pages of Madame Bovary. We’re in a school for boys . . . The very first sentence says’ – he pushed the glasses back up on his forehead and brought the book back under his chin, close to his myopic eyes – ‘We were at preparation, when the headmaster came in, followed by a new boy dressed in “civvies” and a school servant carrying a big desk.’ And so forth and so on . . . uhmmmm, uhmmmm – and then it says, ‘In the corner behind the door, only just visible, stood a country lad of about fifteen, taller than any of us – ‘” Lewin notes that Flaubert begins the book with “’We were in preparation,’” and “’taller than us’” referring to Charles Bovary’s schoolmates. But then Flaubert, Lewin continues, “’never tells the story in the first person plural again, and after a few pages we never see any of the boys again. Now, can anybody tell me why Flaubert uses this device?’” (p. 99). Charlotte raises her hand and answers:

Well, I think he does it that way because what the first chapter really is, is Charles Bovary’s background up to the time he meets Emma Bovary, which is when the story really begins. The last two-thirds of the chapter are written like a plain-long biography, but Flaubert didn’t want to start the book that way . . . because he believed you should get your point across by writing a real vivid scene with just the right details. The point of the first chapter is to show that Charles is a country bumpkin and always has been and always will be, even though he becomes a doctor and everything . . . “Une de ces pauvre chose, enfin, dont la laideur muette a des profondeurs d’expression . . . comme le visage d’un imbecile.” So you start the book seeing Charles the way we – the other boys – saw him, and the way we saw him is so vivid that all the way through the book, you never forget that what Charles is, is a hopeless fool, an idiot (pp. 100-01).

Lewin is aghast. Wolfe makes it known that these are not responses professors at elite universities expect. “Thank you . . . That’s precisely why. Flaubert never simply explained a key point if he could show it instead, and to show it he needed a point of view” (p. 101).

It would seem that Wolfe’s novel is a demonstration of the lessons of “Sorry, but your Soul Just Died.” But appearances are deceiving. Conservatives flocked to I Am Charlotte Simmons as a fitting testimony to the failures of American higher education to provide a moral setting for young teenagers. Liberals vilified Wolfe for the puerile imagination of a man now in his seventies, who by virtue of age cannot possibly understand the ins and outs of a rising generation. Attempts to eulogize or vilify Wolfe miss several essential key features of the novel that give it a subtle and not readily perceptible complexity. When considering the “self” as envisioned and propagated by neuroscientists, Wolfe raises some vexed questions that call into question the soundness of scientific reductionism and materialism. In this respect, I Am Charlotte Simmons goes well beyond “Sorry, but your Soul just Died.” His response to materialism and reductionism is not, as some might expect, disembodied idealism. Neither does Wolfe’s counter by taking refuge in religion. There is evidence to suggest that Wolfe takes issue with the Protestant assault on the Medieval or Catholic synthesis of faith and reason. By placing religious sensibilities out of the reach of reason, early Protestant theology makes a curious and unwitting alliance with strains of Modern anti-rationalism. This essay suggests that Wolfe’s book is curiously Socratic, infused with faint but audible suggestions about the importance of the Classical Greek heritage in higher education, understood as distinct from the effort by Christians to baptize Greek philosophy. On this occasion Wolfe is less Stoic than he is Greek (cf. A Man in Full).
Many thanks to Eduardo for sharing his essay.

Look for A Consumer’s Guide to the Apocalypse in the summer of 2007.

--Marshal Zeringue

January Magazine’s best books of 2006

January Magazine’s writers and editors reviewed thousands of books in 2006 and came up with five "best of" lists--for fiction, crime fiction, art & culture, non-fiction, and books for children.

Click here to read them all.

--Marshal Zeringue

The worst pun in a book title

Suzi Feay writes in the Independent about some pretty awful punning book titles:

Stuart Maconie's memoir Pies and Prejudice: in search of the North (Ebury, published in Feb) did not make the cut - it just isn't punny enough. Not when we have entries of the calibre of I have a Bream by John O'Farrell (Doubleday, Feb), a collection of his newspaper columns; Paws in the Proceedings by Deric Longden (Bantam, May) - Mr Longden apparently writes amusing books about his cats - and Ska'd for Life by Horace Panter (Macmillan, July), a memoir about life on the road with The Specials. Next, edging ever closer to the top spot, is the inspired The Elfish Gene by Mark Barrowcliffe (Macmillan, March), another memoir, this time about growing up obsessed with playing Dungeons and Dragons.

But the winner is: Mark Collings' A Very British Coop (Macmillan, June), a terrifying journey into the world of pigeon-racing that takes the reader on a white-knuckle ride (I'm sorry, I've been reading far too many blurbs) from Manchester to Blackpool to Las Vegas with a crack team of Northern birdmen known as "The Mafia". Collins also picked up valuable points for the strapline, "Rocky with pigeons". So well done Mark, and well done the wacky punsters at Macmillan!

It's a UK-centric group, but I'd bet the American side is at least as bad.

Also, what is with the pigeons--see here and here--in 2006 books?

--Marshal Zeringue

Saturday, December 30, 2006

Pg. 69: "Satan: A Biography"

Henry Ansgar Kelly is Emerit Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

His latest book is Satan: A Biography, which I asked him to put to the "page 69 test." Here is his reply:
Satan: A Biography is my attempt to lay out the history of the Devil chronologically, and to strip it of later interpretations that have been retrofitted to the biblical accounts. Page 69 comes towards the end of my treatment of St. Paul. I have shown how Paul carries on the Old Testament picture of Satan not as God's enemy but as God's minister, a celestial bureaucrat responsible for testing and disciplining humankind. On p. 69 I show that Paul is the only author in the whole of the Bible (both Old and New Testament) to take an interest in the story of Adam, Eve, and the Serpent. And he does NOT identify the Serpent with Satan or connect Satan in any way with the sin of Adam and Eve. The idea that Satan was behind the Fall of Man, which was to form the basis of the doctrine of Original Sin, was an invention of the early Church Fathers. Thus the whole drama of Milton's Paradise Lost is based on a distorted understanding of the Bible.
Many thanks to Henry A. Kelly for the input.

For an excerpt from Satan: A Biography, click here.

Click here to read the Table of Contents for Satan.

Listen to Kelly discuss his book on "AirTalk" from KPCC radio.

In his TLS review, Alastair Sooke called Satan "entertaining as well as rigorous."

For an interview with Kelly that appeared in the UCLA Magazine, click here.

Ruth Glenhill wrote about Satan and its author in the London Times.

In "10 Questions for Henry Kelly," the author talks about his reason for leaving the Jesuit order and how he became a “diabologian.”

Kelly's many other books include The Devil, Demonology, and Witchcraft: The Development of Christian Beliefs in Evil Spirits, The Devil at Baptism: Ritual, Theology, and Drama, and Ideas and Forms of Tragedy from Aristotle to the Middle Ages.

Previous "page 69 tests:"
Alison Gaylin, You Kill Me
Gayle Lynds, The Last Spymaster
Jim Lehrer, The Phony Marine
Julie Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr.
Debra Ginsberg, Blind Submission
Sarah Katherine Lewis, Indecent
Peter Orner, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo
William Easterly, The White Man's Burden
Danielle Trussoni, Falling Through the Earth
Andrew Blechman, Pigeons
Anne Perry, A Christmas Secret
Elaine Showalter, Faculty Towers
Kat Richardson, Greywalker
Michael Bess, Choices Under Fire
Masha Hamilton, The Camel Bookmobile
Alex Beam, Gracefully Insane
Nicholas Lemann, Redemption
Jason Sokol, There Goes My Everything
Wendy Steiner, Venus in Exile
Josh Chafetz, Democracy’s Privileged Few
Anne Frasier, Pale Immortal
Michael Lewis, The Blind Side
David A. Bell, The First Total War
Brett Ellen Block, The Lightning Rule
Rosanna Hertz, Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice
Jason Starr, Lights Out
Robert Vitalis, America's Kingdom
Stephen Elliott, My Girlfriend Comes To The City And Beats Me Up
Colin McGinn, The Power of Movies
Sean Chercover, Big City, Bad Blood
Sigrid Nunez, The Last of Her Kind
Stanley Fish, How Milton Works
James Longenbach, The Resistance to Poetry
Margaret Lowrie Robertson, Season of Betrayal
Sy Montgomery, The Good Good Pig
Allison Burnett, The House Beautiful
Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, A History
Ed Lynskey, The Dirt-Brown Derby
Cindy Dyson, And She Was
Simon Blackburn, Truth
Brian Freeman, Stripped
Alyson M. Cole, The Cult of True Victimhood
Jeff Biggers, In the Sierra Madre
Jeff Broadwater, George Mason, Forgotten Founder
Alicia Steimberg, Andrea Labinger (trans.), The Rainforest
Michael Grunwald, The Swamp
Darrin McMahon, Happiness: A History
Leo Braudy, From Chivalry to Terrorism
David Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie
Leah Hager Cohen, Train Go Sorry
Chris Grabenstein, Slay Ride
David Helvarg, Blue Frontier
Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria
Bill Crider, A Mammoth Murder
Robert W. Bennett, Taming the Electoral College
Nicholas Stern et al, Stern Review Report
Kerry Emanuel, Divine Wind
Adam Langer, The Washington Story
Michael Scott Moore, Too Much of Nothing
Frank Schaeffer, Baby Jack
Wyn Cooper, Postcards from the Interior
Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov
Maureen Ogle, Ambitious Brew
Cass Sunstein, Infotopia
Paul W. Kahn, Out of Eden
Paul Lewis, Cracking Up
Pagan Kennedy, Confessions of a Memory Eater
David Greenberg, Nixon's Shadow
Duane Swierczynski, The Wheelman
George Levine, Darwin Loves You
John Barlow, Intoxicated
Alicia Steimberg, The Rainforest
Alan Wolfe, Does American Democracy Still Work?
John Dickerson, On Her Trail
Marcus Sakey, The Blade Itself
Randy Boyagoda, Governor of the Northern Province
John Gittings, The Changing Face of China
Rachel Kadish, Tolstoy Lied
Eric Rauchway, Blessed Among Nations
Tim Brookes, Guitar and other books
Ruth Padel, Tigers in Red Weather
William Haywood Henderson, Augusta Locke
Jed Horne, Breach of Faith
Robert Greer, The Fourth Perspective
David Plotz, The Genius Factory
Michael Allen Dymmoch, White Tiger
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy
Tom Lutz, Doing Nothing
Libby Fischer Hellmann, A Shot To Die For
Nelson Algren, The Man With the Golden Arm
Bob Harris, Prisoner of Trebekistan
Elaine Flinn, Deadly Collection
Louise Welsh, The Bullet Trick
Gregg Hurwitz, Last Shot
Martha Powers, Death Angel
N.M. Kelby, Whale Season
Mario Acevedo, The Nymphos of Rocky Flats
Dominic Smith, The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre
Simon Blackburn, Lust
Linda L. Richards, Calculated Loss
Kevin Guilfoile, Cast of Shadows
Ronlyn Domingue, The Mercy of Thin Air
Shari Caudron, Who Are You People?
Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics
John Sutherland, How to Read a Novel
Steven Miles, Oath Betrayed
Alan Brown, Audrey Hepburn's Neck
Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale

--Marshal Zeringue

A top ten list of crime fiction

J. Kingston Pierce of The Rap Sheet has posted his top-10 list of crime-fiction picks from the last year.

Two of the titles were among my favorite books in that category, several others were already on my "To Read" list, and now I'll add the rest.

George Pelecanos' The Night Gardener made Pierce's list and mine. Last summer I linked to some of Pelecanos' favorite books, and later made a case that The Night Gardener is the second best novel for fans of HBO's The Wire.

The other title on Pierce's list and mine: Duane Swierczynski's The Blonde, a novel that I'd like to adapt for the big screen.

Also here on the blog: Swierczynski put his novel The Wheelman to the "page 69" test.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top books on space

William Burrows, author of This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age and, more recently, The Survival Imperative: Using Space to Protect Earth, named five top books on space exploration for Opinion Journal.

One title on the list:
Bad Astronomy by Philip Plait

Philip Plait is a California astronomer who evidently became so exasperated with the contemporary warping of science by ideology or just plain ignorance that he wrote "Bad Astronomy" as an antidote. This primer on basic astronomy explains, among much else, why the moon sometimes hits your eye like a big pizza pie (it happens when the moon reaches the perigee of its elliptical orbit and is closest to us). But Plait's astronomical discussions also take on creationism. My favorite part of the book: when he goes after the crowd that claims the Apollo moon landings were a hoax. Years ago, Buzz Aldrin showed one way to deal with this bizarre belief when someone shoved a Bible at him and demanded that he swear he actually landed on the moon; Aldrin decked the guy. Plait achieves the equivalent with words.
Click here to read about the other books on Burrows' list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Friday, December 29, 2006

The best book cover of 2006?

Pete Anderson of Pete Lit alerted me to a book cover that is at least as wonderful as the five titles named The Best Book Covers of 2006 by Bookslut.

It's An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories, edited by Ivan Brunetti.

The book earned wide acclaim, including:
"‘Graphic fiction,’ whether fantastical or quotidian, bleak or giddy, begins through this book to feel very much like a movement, like art in a well-conceived gallery show or music in a well-organized festival."
—David Hajdu, New York Times Book Review

"Brunetti's specific interests in the classic gag cartoon and the artists included here expand the dialogue started in Chris Ware's anthology in fruitful ways."
—Art Spiegelman
Click here to listen to an interview with Ivan Brunetti on the Yale Press Podcast.

For Pete's Top 10 reads of 2006, click here.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: "You Kill Me"

Alison Gaylin is a journalist who has covered the arts and entertainment for more than ten years. Her first novel, Hide Your Eyes, debuted in March, 2005 with nearly a quarter of a million copies in print. Its sequel, You Kill Me, was published last December.

I asked Alison to apply the "page 69 test" to her book; here is her reply:
Interestingly, page 69 of You Kill Me is almost all dialogue. It includes some information – seemingly unimportant – that winds up playing a key role in suspense toward the end of the book.

You Kill Me is the sequel to Hide Your Eyes, a novel in which pre-school teacher/off-off Broadway box office worker Samantha Leiffer witnesses the aftermath of a brutal murder and kills a serial killer. YKM takes place a year later, in fall, 2002. She’s moved in with Det. John Krull, and their relationship leaves a lot to be desired. Deeply affected by 9/11, the 6th precinct detective has become laconic and remote. They don’t communicate the way they used to, and Krull’s frequent, mysterious disappearances are making Sam distrust him. They’re rarely alone together and, true to form, they’re not alone on page 69. Instead, Sam and Krull are watching a Yankees game in their Stuyvessant Town apartment with Zachary Pierce, a very short, gym-addicted, shaved-headed detective friend of Krull’s who defines the term “overcompensation.”

Though not much happens in terms of action on this page, Pierce’s sudden explosion over a bad play changes the direction of the previously calm scene. It also includes my editor’s favorite metaphor in the book. (FYI, they’ve been discussing ‘All About Me’ collages, a magazine-picture project Sam has been doing with her pre-schoolers):

“Did you have Playboy?” said Pierce.

Krull sighed. “No, Zach, she didn’t get Playboy for the four-year-olds.”

“Because if I was going to make an ‘All About Me,’ collage, I’d need Playboy,” he said. Then, “Fucking Wells!” at the top of his lungs, without warning. Like some kind of testosterone bomb, detonating in the middle of our apartment.

Jake thudded to the floor and scurried out of the room.

“Jesus,” said Krull. “It was only ball one.”

In a book where a character winds up behaving in the ultimate unexpected way – committing horrible murders – Pierce’s overreaction contributes to the theme… and ultimately, to the plot.

And my editor really liked the testosterone bomb.
Many thanks to Alison for the input.

For excerpts from You Kill Me, click here.

Among the praise for the novel:
"Post-9/11 Manhattan is the ominous setting for Gaylin's deliciously chilling second thriller (after Hide Your Eyes), in which preschool teacher Samantha Leiffer is still recovering from her brush with a murderer a year earlier. Her live-in cop boyfriend, John Krull, has suddenly gone emotionally (and sometimes physically) AWOL, so after a mysterious visitor leaves Samantha a series of warning notes about her safety, she's forced to grapple alone with what they could mean, if anything at all. As if on cue, people around Samantha start to die, beginning with the woman who lived in Samantha's old apartment, gorily murdered. If the signs point where Samantha thinks they're pointing, maybe she'd rather be in the dark. Though the novel has some trappings of generic chick lit--a loudmouth mother, a gay best friend and kooky secondary characters--Gaylin casts them all in a fresh light. Sparing use of clever inner monologue paints Samantha as the hero we all hope we'd be."
--Publisher's Weekly
Click here to visit the group blog powered by Alison and a few other mystery writers.

Learn more about Edgar-nominee Hide Your Eyes here.

Curious about what an articles editor at In Touch magazine does? Click here to find out.

Previous "page 69 tests:"
Gayle Lynds, The Last Spymaster
Jim Lehrer, The Phony Marine
Julie Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr.
Debra Ginsberg, Blind Submission
Sarah Katherine Lewis, Indecent
Peter Orner, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo
William Easterly, The White Man's Burden
Danielle Trussoni, Falling Through the Earth
Andrew Blechman, Pigeons
Anne Perry, A Christmas Secret
Elaine Showalter, Faculty Towers
Kat Richardson, Greywalker
Michael Bess, Choices Under Fire
Masha Hamilton, The Camel Bookmobile
Alex Beam, Gracefully Insane
Nicholas Lemann, Redemption
Jason Sokol, There Goes My Everything
Wendy Steiner, Venus in Exile
Josh Chafetz, Democracy’s Privileged Few
Anne Frasier, Pale Immortal
Michael Lewis, The Blind Side
David A. Bell, The First Total War
Brett Ellen Block, The Lightning Rule
Rosanna Hertz, Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice
Jason Starr, Lights Out
Robert Vitalis, America's Kingdom
Stephen Elliott, My Girlfriend Comes To The City And Beats Me Up
Colin McGinn, The Power of Movies
Sean Chercover, Big City, Bad Blood
Sigrid Nunez, The Last of Her Kind
Stanley Fish, How Milton Works
James Longenbach, The Resistance to Poetry
Margaret Lowrie Robertson, Season of Betrayal
Sy Montgomery, The Good Good Pig
Allison Burnett, The House Beautiful
Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, A History
Ed Lynskey, The Dirt-Brown Derby
Cindy Dyson, And She Was
Simon Blackburn, Truth
Brian Freeman, Stripped
Alyson M. Cole, The Cult of True Victimhood
Jeff Biggers, In the Sierra Madre
Jeff Broadwater, George Mason, Forgotten Founder
Alicia Steimberg, Andrea Labinger (trans.), The Rainforest
Michael Grunwald, The Swamp
Darrin McMahon, Happiness: A History
Leo Braudy, From Chivalry to Terrorism
David Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie
Leah Hager Cohen, Train Go Sorry
Chris Grabenstein, Slay Ride
David Helvarg, Blue Frontier
Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria
Bill Crider, A Mammoth Murder
Robert W. Bennett, Taming the Electoral College
Nicholas Stern et al, Stern Review Report
Kerry Emanuel, Divine Wind
Adam Langer, The Washington Story
Michael Scott Moore, Too Much of Nothing
Frank Schaeffer, Baby Jack
Wyn Cooper, Postcards from the Interior
Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov
Maureen Ogle, Ambitious Brew
Cass Sunstein, Infotopia
Paul W. Kahn, Out of Eden
Paul Lewis, Cracking Up
Pagan Kennedy, Confessions of a Memory Eater
David Greenberg, Nixon's Shadow
Duane Swierczynski, The Wheelman
George Levine, Darwin Loves You
John Barlow, Intoxicated
Alicia Steimberg, The Rainforest
Alan Wolfe, Does American Democracy Still Work?
John Dickerson, On Her Trail
Marcus Sakey, The Blade Itself
Randy Boyagoda, Governor of the Northern Province
John Gittings, The Changing Face of China
Rachel Kadish, Tolstoy Lied
Eric Rauchway, Blessed Among Nations
Tim Brookes, Guitar and other books
Ruth Padel, Tigers in Red Weather
William Haywood Henderson, Augusta Locke
Jed Horne, Breach of Faith
Robert Greer, The Fourth Perspective
David Plotz, The Genius Factory
Michael Allen Dymmoch, White Tiger
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy
Tom Lutz, Doing Nothing
Libby Fischer Hellmann, A Shot To Die For
Nelson Algren, The Man With the Golden Arm
Bob Harris, Prisoner of Trebekistan
Elaine Flinn, Deadly Collection
Louise Welsh, The Bullet Trick
Gregg Hurwitz, Last Shot
Martha Powers, Death Angel
N.M. Kelby, Whale Season
Mario Acevedo, The Nymphos of Rocky Flats
Dominic Smith, The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre
Simon Blackburn, Lust
Linda L. Richards, Calculated Loss
Kevin Guilfoile, Cast of Shadows
Ronlyn Domingue, The Mercy of Thin Air
Shari Caudron, Who Are You People?
Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics
John Sutherland, How to Read a Novel
Steven Miles, Oath Betrayed
Alan Brown, Audrey Hepburn's Neck
Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale

--Marshal Zeringue

Chandler’s “Ten Commandments for the Detective Novel”

Jeff Pierce of The Rap Sheet asks:
Am I the only one who doesn’t remember seeing Raymond Chandler’s “Ten Commandments for the Detective Novel” before?
No, Jeff, you are not alone.

Pierce "came across this list while surfing through The Thrilling Detective Web Site earlier today. Apparently, these 'commandments' were published previously in The Book of Literary Lists: A Collection of Annotated Lists of Fact, Statistics, and Anecdotes Concerning Books (1985), edited by Nicholas Parsons. While Chandler’s prescriptions are quite different from S.S. Van Dine’s 'Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories,' the two make good companions."

Click here to read Chandler's rules and Pierce's partial disagreement.

Visit The Thrilling Detective.

--Marshal Zeringue

The Best Book Covers of 2006

"The Best Book Covers of 2006," according to Bookslut:

Sweet and Low: A Family Story by Rich Cohen
Cover Art: Mickey Duzyj

It may be that one day we'll feel the same way about comic-book-style illustration as we do about, say, memoirs with out-of-focus family photographs on the cover. But even if this style were on its way out, this would still be an enormously effective piece of design -- from the iconic "Sweet & Low" color scheme, to the comic strip that snakes its way across the cover summarizing the storyline in a way that echoes the hubris and relentless, can-do mercantilism of the era the book describes. The book practically begs to be read while wearing a pink sweater set, and heels, preferably while drinking black coffee.

Click here to see the other picks.

Related items here on the blog:
Manolo Blahnik & Madame Bovary
A fashion editor's top books on shoes
Attractive author, seductive book
Books and their covers
Judging a book by its cover

--Marshal Zeringue

Thursday, December 28, 2006

Twice-told tales

In my latest post over at Spot-on, I ask:
What compels a novelist to try to retell another writer's story? I can imagine a number of reasons to take as one's inspiration a well-known story, including: as an homage, as a goof or a spoof, to expose the ideological or political underpinnings of the original work, or simply because the earlier story is so good that mimicking it is irresistible.
From there I ramble on about a number of my favorite examples of twice-told tales, including recycled stories based on works by Homer, Shakespeare, Dickens, Kate Chopin, William Golding, and others.

Check it out.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ed Gorman's 2006 book list

Over at Bookgasm Ed Gorman came up with a top 10 list under this rubric:
Since I’m never sure what “best” is supposed to mean, I’m submitting these books because they gave me great degrees of pleasure in a variety of ways.
His list includes titles by Dean Koontz, Norman Partridge, Richard Stark, Michael Connelly, Bill Pronzini, Tom Piccirilli, Jeffrey Ford, Max Allan Collins, Robert Randisi, and Paul Malmont.

(Hat tip to The Rap Sheet.)

--Marshal Zeringue

Wednesday, December 27, 2006

The sadness of George III

Many Americans think of George III--if they think of him at all--as the British tyrant colonial Americans had to fight to gain our independence. That simplistic caricature masks a much more interesting person.

A Royal Affair: George III and his Scandalous Siblings by Stella Tillyard apparently (I haven't read the book) tells part of his and his family's story. William Grimes reviews the book in today's New York Times.

Alan Bennett wrote a brilliant play and screenplay about George III that became the film The Madness of King George. (Rumor had it that the film title was changed from The Madness of George III because the producers were worried that American audiences might think they had missed George and a sequel, George II, and would stay away from the third in the wrongly-imagined trilogy.)

As it happens, I also wrote a play--titled George & Charlotte--that I'd planned to debut in New Orleans...when Katrina struck.

Any producers out there interested in a stage comedy requiring minimal staging and three actors with a gift for comedy and plummy British accents? Please get in touch.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: "The Last Spymaster"

Gayle Lynds is on one of the more impressive book lists I've come across in recent memory: her book Masquerade is #8 on Peter Cannon's list of the "Top 15 Spy Novels." That's not the Top 15 of 2006, but the Top 15 ever ... which puts her in some very impressive company.

Gayle's most recent book is The Last Spymaster.

I asked her to apply the "page 69 test" to the novel; here is her reply:
I'm tremendously curious about the choice of page 69.... When I look at the cuddly position of those two digits, I think of yin and yang, and of course, being from Iowa, I'm reminded of a certain sexual position that when I was growing up was practiced (and repracticed) but went unnamed except by those so sophisticated that everyone knew they were destined for the greatness (hedonism) of New York City or maybe, a poor second-place choice made better only because palm trees were included, Los Angeles.

And all of that has absolutely nothing to do with The Last Spymaster.

But maybe it does. Page 69, which is the last page of Chapter Eight, contains only this:

whose guns hung from their hands. The black orbs of their sunglasses peered up at the plane.

Tice studied the angry faces, adjusting for the years he had been away.

"Recognize any?" Westwood wanted to know.

Tice sat back and glanced at Westwood. Betraying no emotion, he lied: "No. Nothing but strangers."

Check out that first sentence with orbs and hanging guns. Where did those blatant phallic symbols come from? Me? I blush.

On the other hand, my college lit teachers would be in seventh heaven. Interestingly, there's little sex in the book, and now I'm regretting it. Well, what's there is pretty good though. You'll have to tell me what you think.

Moving right along, and doing the same sort of word picking.... We know that the gunmen are "angry," that "Tice" has "been away" a number of years, that he "recognizes" one or more of the gunmen, and that he "lies" so his companion won't know that.

If you sense danger and dark secrets, you'd be right. Tice is the last spymaster of the title, and he's been in prison for several years, charged with giving U.S. secrets to the Russians. Now he's being chased by a CIA hunter as well as a group of men whom he is just starting to identify. Considered one of the greatest spymasters of all time, Tice becomes an unwilling mentor to the hunter, and we discover with them who the men are and what they're really up to.

I'm delighted to tell you that the book was named Novel of the Year by the Military Writers Society of America. If you enjoy spy tales, I hope you'll try The Last Spymaster.
Many thanks to Gayle for the input.

Click here for excerpts from The Last Spymaster.

Among the praise for The Last Spymaster:
"Today's finest espionage writer unleashes an instant classic."
--Lee Child

"...fascinating characters, nerve-tingling pace, and a great story. It reminds me of Robert Ludlum at his very best. This cements Lynds' reputation as one of the premier espionage authors of our time."
--Vince Flynn

"A sizzling thrill ride... seamlessly melding global politics, cutting-edge technology, and the dark world of espionage into a compelling, full-blooded novel. [Lynds is] a master of the spy thriller."
--Steve Berry
Last month Dick Adler put The Last Spymaster atop his list of contenders for the best mysteries and thrillers of the year.

Click here for a Q & A with Gayle, and here for her interview with the Bookreporter.com.

Elaine Flinn (herself a "page 69" veteran) had this exchange with Lynds "On the Bubble" at Murderati back in May 2006.

Earlier this year Gayle made the case that we are in the midst of The Decade of the Spy.

Click here for articles and interviews with Gayle, including a radio interview with KPFA, a YouTube video of Gayle discussing the difference between thrillers and mysteries, and more.

Visit Gayle's official website.

Previous "page 69 tests:"
Jim Lehrer, The Phony Marine
Julie Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr.
Debra Ginsberg, Blind Submission
Sarah Katherine Lewis, Indecent
Peter Orner, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo
William Easterly, The White Man's Burden
Danielle Trussoni, Falling Through the Earth
Andrew Blechman, Pigeons
Anne Perry, A Christmas Secret
Elaine Showalter, Faculty Towers
Kat Richardson, Greywalker
Michael Bess, Choices Under Fire
Masha Hamilton, The Camel Bookmobile
Alex Beam, Gracefully Insane
Nicholas Lemann, Redemption
Jason Sokol, There Goes My Everything
Wendy Steiner, Venus in Exile
Josh Chafetz, Democracy’s Privileged Few
Anne Frasier, Pale Immortal
Michael Lewis, The Blind Side
David A. Bell, The First Total War
Brett Ellen Block, The Lightning Rule
Rosanna Hertz, Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice
Jason Starr, Lights Out
Robert Vitalis, America's Kingdom
Stephen Elliott, My Girlfriend Comes To The City And Beats Me Up
Colin McGinn, The Power of Movies
Sean Chercover, Big City, Bad Blood
Sigrid Nunez, The Last of Her Kind
Stanley Fish, How Milton Works
James Longenbach, The Resistance to Poetry
Margaret Lowrie Robertson, Season of Betrayal
Sy Montgomery, The Good Good Pig
Allison Burnett, The House Beautiful
Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, A History
Ed Lynskey, The Dirt-Brown Derby
Cindy Dyson, And She Was
Simon Blackburn, Truth
Brian Freeman, Stripped
Alyson M. Cole, The Cult of True Victimhood
Jeff Biggers, In the Sierra Madre
Jeff Broadwater, George Mason, Forgotten Founder
Alicia Steimberg, Andrea Labinger (trans.), The Rainforest
Michael Grunwald, The Swamp
Darrin McMahon, Happiness: A History
Leo Braudy, From Chivalry to Terrorism
David Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie
Leah Hager Cohen, Train Go Sorry
Chris Grabenstein, Slay Ride
David Helvarg, Blue Frontier
Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria
Bill Crider, A Mammoth Murder
Robert W. Bennett, Taming the Electoral College
Nicholas Stern et al, Stern Review Report
Kerry Emanuel, Divine Wind
Adam Langer, The Washington Story
Michael Scott Moore, Too Much of Nothing
Frank Schaeffer, Baby Jack
Wyn Cooper, Postcards from the Interior
Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov
Maureen Ogle, Ambitious Brew
Cass Sunstein, Infotopia
Paul W. Kahn, Out of Eden
Paul Lewis, Cracking Up
Pagan Kennedy, Confessions of a Memory Eater
David Greenberg, Nixon's Shadow
Duane Swierczynski, The Wheelman
George Levine, Darwin Loves You
John Barlow, Intoxicated
Alicia Steimberg, The Rainforest
Alan Wolfe, Does American Democracy Still Work?
John Dickerson, On Her Trail
Marcus Sakey, The Blade Itself
Randy Boyagoda, Governor of the Northern Province
John Gittings, The Changing Face of China
Rachel Kadish, Tolstoy Lied
Eric Rauchway, Blessed Among Nations
Tim Brookes, Guitar and other books
Ruth Padel, Tigers in Red Weather
William Haywood Henderson, Augusta Locke
Jed Horne, Breach of Faith
Robert Greer, The Fourth Perspective
David Plotz, The Genius Factory
Michael Allen Dymmoch, White Tiger
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy
Tom Lutz, Doing Nothing
Libby Fischer Hellmann, A Shot To Die For
Nelson Algren, The Man With the Golden Arm
Bob Harris, Prisoner of Trebekistan
Elaine Flinn, Deadly Collection
Louise Welsh, The Bullet Trick
Gregg Hurwitz, Last Shot
Martha Powers, Death Angel
N.M. Kelby, Whale Season
Mario Acevedo, The Nymphos of Rocky Flats
Dominic Smith, The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre
Simon Blackburn, Lust
Linda L. Richards, Calculated Loss
Kevin Guilfoile, Cast of Shadows
Ronlyn Domingue, The Mercy of Thin Air
Shari Caudron, Who Are You People?
Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics
John Sutherland, How to Read a Novel
Steven Miles, Oath Betrayed
Alan Brown, Audrey Hepburn's Neck
Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale

--Marshal Zeringue