Books: Well Dog My Cats! "Pogo" Gets Dee-luxe Treatment!

POGO: THROUGH THE WILD BLUE YONDER -- THE COMPLETE SYNDICATED COMIC STRIPS VOLUME 1 BY WALT KELLY ($39.99; Fantagraphics)

For many years, the comic strips that deserved legendary acclaim had to be taken on faith. We can watch old movies and TV shows and listen to classic albums and read great books. But practically speaking, many classic comic strips hailed as influential, ground-breaking, hilarious and the like were simply unavailable or in such a bastardized and incomplete form that it was nigh on impossible to judge them fairly. Even something as wildly popular as Peanuts wasn't really available to read from start to finish the way you would with any other work of art.

No more. We're finally seeing comic strips receive the attention and care they deserve. Classic works like Krazy Kat and Gasoline Alley (aka Walt And Skeezix) and Prince Valiant and yes Peanuts are receiving or have received gorgeous reprints in multi-volume sets that for the very first time since they first appeared in newspapers or magazines lets us appreciate the work and see how it's stood the test of time.

The latest to be lovingly restored is Pogo, Walt Kelly's strip that I have dutifully recognized as probably one of the greats (according to everyone else, at least) though I'd never seen so much as a single panel of it. Fantagraphics has made the wait worthwhile with Volume 1, which covers strips from October of 1948 through December 31, 1950. The book is bursting with useful, entertaining extras, from a foreword by Jimmy Breslin to an in-depth introduction by Steve Thompson that helpfully spells out Kelly's life and the history of the strip to footnotes (called Swamp Talk) by R.C. Harvey. The heart of the book are the daily strips presented with six days of work on every two page spread with the color Sunday comics in a separate section followed by the early daily strips for the New York Star before Pogo was syndicated. Here's a look at this gorgeous, enjoyably hefty volume.



That's all well and fine. The book is lovingly made and the strips presented with care and pleasure. But is it any good? Oh yes. It's funny and charming, bursting with witty wordplay and vivid characters you love immediately. You can see the influence the Marx Brothers and Krazy Kat and Mark Twain had on Pogo and its love of silly grammatical puns and Southern dialect. And you can see the influence Pogo had on Doonesbury and Calvin & Hobbes in its playful recognition that it was a comic strip (Pogo acknowledges letters about the strip just as Doonesbury would occasionally open a mail bag to answer reader letters) and gentle humor. The lovably grumpy Porkypine is surely a cousin of Eeyore and (later) Oscar the Grouch. Pogo even ran for President, with the catchy slogan of "I Go Pogo" to counter "I Like Ike."

In short, read Pogo and you can immediately see it slide into the pop cultural matrix and how it drew upon the work that came earlier, moved forward the art form of comic strips and influenced artists after it for generations to come. But most of all you'll laugh and savor catch phrases like "We have met the enemy and he is us!" (surely the strip's most famous) as well as Southernisms like "Dog my cats!" and the like.

Pogo is famous for its political satire but in this first volume the denizens of Okefenokee Swamp are (swiftly) defining themselves. Some modest teasing of newspaper reporters and elections don't really square with the image I had of the strip, but that is surely yet to come. Here we engage in simpler pursuits by Pogo Possum, Albert the Alligator (forever swallowing -- by accident -- fellow critters), Porkypine and the rest. They dive deliriously into baseball in October, take care of a stray pup, search for the Fountain of Youth, try to convince little critters to go to Owl's new school ("It's Saturday!")  and so on.

Whether they go digging in the dirt for a square root for math class or insist it ain't cricket to hit a baseball with your tail ("Who's playing cricket?" shouts Albert the Alligator as he rounds the bases. "Look out for Home Run Baker!"), the heart of this first volume is Kelly's delight in language and Southern improvements on it. MIlwaukee is "fraught and ree-plete" with cows and other Western wonders. When Albert tries to learn his numbers he insists that eleven follows seven. "Like the night the day...seven come ee-leven. Anybody knows that!" (The teacher gives up, graduates Albert and makes him a truant officer.) When Owl suggests Pogo actually break some of his New Year's resolutions instead of being a do-gooder, Pogo asks what kind breaks easy. "Any kind I makes," says Owl. "Man, I is got resolutions left over from last year what I isn't even had time to break yet!" Pogo responds, "Bring a couple over, size 6 1/2."

Here's a New Year's resolution for you: dive into Pogo, one of the best comic strips of all time. You don't have to take my word for it anymore; you can read it yourself.

BOOKS I'VE READ -- 2011

Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand *** 1/2
The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin ****
Two Adolescents by Alberto Moravia *** 1/2
King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard ** 1/2
Cart & Cwidder by Diana Wynne Jones ** 1/2
A Game Of Thrones by George R.R. Martin ****
A Clash Of Kings by George R.R. Martin ***1/2
Just A Dream by Chris Van Allsburg * 1/2
The Good Book: A Humanist Bible by A.C. Grayling ***
Dodsworth in Rome by Tim Egan ***
Prince Valiant Vol. 1: 1937-1938 by Hal Foster ***
Prince Valiant Vol. 2: 1939-1940 by Hal Foster ***
Prince Valiant Vol. 3: 1941-1942 by Hal Foster *** 1/2
A Storm Of Swords by George R.R. Martin *** 1/2
Queen Of The Falls by Chris Van Allsburg ** 1/2
A Feast For Crows by George R.R. Martin *** 1/2
The Greater Journey: Americans In Paris by David McCullough ***
The Great Night by Chris Adrian ** 1/2
Empire State Of Mind by Zack O'Malley Greenburg
The Little Red Pen by Janet Stevens & Susan Stevens Crummel * 1/2
21: The Story Of Roberto Clemente by Wilfred Santiago ** 1/2
The Siege Of Washington by John Lockwood & Charles Lockwood ***
Malcolm X; A Life Of Reinvention by Manning Marable ****
Dawn, Dusk or Night by Yasmina Reza ** 1/2
Unforgivable by Phillipe Djian **
On Being: A Scientist's Exploration Of The Great Questions Of Existence by Peter Atkins **
Mygale by Thierry Jonquet **
Berlin, 1961: Kennedy, Kruschev And The Most Dangerous Place On Earth by Frederick Kempe *** 1/2
High Strung: Bjorn Borg, John McEnroe and the Untold Story Of Tennis's Fiercest Rivalry by Stephen Tignor ** 1/2
Death At La Fenice by Donna Leon ** 1/2
Death In A Strange Country by Donna Leon ***
My Friend Flicka by Mary O'Hara ***
Drive by James Sallis **
The Magicians by Lev Grossman ***
The Magician King by Lev Grossman ** 1/2
The Buddha In The Attic by Julie Otsuka ****
Fly By Night by Frances Hardinage ***
Thunderhead by Mary O'Hara *** 1/2
The Hypnotist by Lars Kepler ** 1/2
Cocktail Hour Under The Tree Of Forgetfulness by Alexandra Fuller *** 1/2
East Of The West by Miroslav Penkov ***
Sum: Forty Tales From The Afterlives by David Eagleman ***
Green Grass Of Wyoming by Mary O'Hara ***
A Dance With Dragons by George R.R. Martin *** 1/2
Willie & Joe Back Home by Bill Mauldin ***
The Cut By George Pelecanos ** 1/2
Grand Pursuit by Sylvia Nasar ***/
A Matter For Men: War Of the Chtorrs by David Gerrold **
A Rage For Revenge: War Of The Chtorrs by David Gerrold * 1/2
The Shootist by Glendon Swarthout ***
Sea Of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh *** 1/2
River Of Smoke by Amitav Ghosh *** 1/2
When The Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka *** 1/2
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway *** 1/2
Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson *** 1/2
Cousins: A Memoir by Athol Fugard **
The Art Of Fielding by Chad Harbach ***
The Rings Of Saturn by W.G. Sebald ****
Siddhartha by Herman Hesse * 1/2
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides ** 1/2
John Henry Days by Colson Whitehead ***
Prince Valiant Vol. 4: 1943-1944 by Hal Foster ***
Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson ** 1/2
Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin ***
The House Of Silk by Anthony Horowitz ** 1/2
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell ****
The Invention Of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick ***
The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien ****
The Leviathan by Joseph Roth (trans by Michael Hoffman) *** 1/2
Five Chiefs: A Supreme Court Memoir by John Paul Stevens * 1/2
Train Dreams by Denis Johnson ***
Where The Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls **
Pogo: Through The Wild Blue Yonder -- The Complete Syndicated Comic Strips Volume 1 by Walt Kelly ****

Thanks for reading. Michael Giltz is the co-host of Showbiz Sandbox, a weekly pop culture podcast that reveals the industry take on entertainment news of the day and features top journalists and opinion makers as guests. It's available free on iTunes. Visit Michael Giltz at his website and his daily blog.  Download his podcast of celebrity interviews and his radio show, also called Popsurfing and also available for free on iTunes. Link to him on Netflix and gain access to thousands of ratings and reviews. 


NOTE: Michael Giltz is provided with free copies of books to consider for review, including digital and physical galleys as well as final review copies. He typically does not guarantee coverage and invariably receives far more books than he can cover.

Veteran's Day -- Five Books To Read

THE THINGS THEY CARRIED BY TIM O'BRIEN ($14.95 PAPERBACK; HOUGHTON MIFFLIN)
MATTERHORN BY KARL MARLANTES ($15.95 PAPERBACK; GROVE PRESS)
WHAT IT IS LIKE TO GO TO WAR BY KARL MARLANTES ($25; ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS)
WILLIE & JOE: THE WW II YEARS BY BILL MAULDIN ($39.99 PAPERBACK; FANTAGRAPHICS)
WILLIE & JOE BACK HOME BY BILL MAULDIN ($29.99; FANTAGRAPHICS)

Today is Veterans Day, so I've been leading up to it by reading some of the current and classic works about war and soldiers. You can't go wrong with any of them or a hundred other books one might name. These are just the few that happened to snag my attention in the last few weeks.




You can't go wrong with The Things They Carried, acclaimed as a modern masterpiece the day it was released in 1990 and, if anything, it's reputation has only grown. The Tim O'Brien collection of short stories is a favorite "handseller" of independent bookstores. That is, it's one of those books they will always recommend to lovers of good fiction looking for a discovery.  It's based on O'Brien's experience in the Vietnam War.







That's also the source for the work of Karl Marlantes, who quietly set up shop on the bestseller list with the novel Matterhorn last year. Now he's returned with What It Is Like To Go To War, a nonfiction work about his experience in war and how ill-prepared most 19-year-old kids are to endure it. It's already appearing on lists of the best books of the year and is a fascinating companion piece to Matterhorn.







But today I want to talk art inspired by another war: the cartoons of Bill Mauldin. At one point, this man who made the cover of Time magazine twice was perhaps the most famous average soldier in the world (as compared to generals like Patton and Eisenhower). Mauldin's Willie & Joe were grunts, regular foot soldiers who sat in the mud, complained about the food and otherwise captured the cynical, direct, let's get this job done right so we don't have to do it again attitude that soldiers embodied during WW II.

First and foremost, Willie & Joe are funny. Fantagraphics has put the WW II years out in paperback, but I've got the also available hardcover, a great looking slipcase in army green with two fat volumes of his captivating artwork. Never having served (or even fired a gun), it's an absorbing glimpse into the day-to-day life of soldiers while it was happening and the end not known. It's easy to identify with: employees in any capacity gripe about their bosses. But the more specific Mauldin is, the more biting and fascinating his work is. The strip was a remarkable outlet for frustrations and annoyance and genuine anger: it didn't just poke fun at the higher-ups; it revealed problems and gripes that needed to be addressed. Seeing Willie & Joe endure the same craziness was surely comforting. But this wasn't just an easy way to redirect attention from the actual problems they faced. And while the war was on, people at home took just as much comfort in their sad sack endurance. It was wildly popular among civilians as well as soldiers; being able to joke about the hardships meant they'd be okay in the end, right?

Finally, it's Willie & Joe: Back Home that moved me the most. The cover shows a soldier without a place to stay, sleeping on a park bench and covered in a poster saying "Welcome Home" to the soldiers. Too often, soldiers are praised and appreciated in the heat of battle but treated like an annoyance once the fighting has stopped. Bill Mauldin wasn't even sure anyone would want to hear about Willie & Joe once World War II had been won and, indeed, the strip faded in popularity, especially as Mauldin tackled social issues and kept a spotlight on the poor treatment of soldiers, who deserved better.

Clearly, veterans don't get two votes at the ballot box despite their service and the risking of life and limb when called to duty. But sometimes even that one vote, that one voice is begrudged, whether it's the veteran in Oakland sent to the hospital by cops during an apparently peaceful protest in the Occupy movement or a soldier getting booed during a Presidential debate because he identified himself as gay and said he wanted to serve his country without having to lie.

it's all happened before. Todd DePastino's excellent essay details Mauldin's career, his artistic achievements and the battles he fought within himself and with his syndicators over this series. Mauldin is always funny, but those with a rosy image of WW II will be surprised by the complex world shown here: sometimes veterans are chagrined to discover that jobs they were assured would be waiting for them have disappeared while other times they're disconcerted to see the person who is going to be fired to make way for them. Again and again, veterans are forgotten, forced to travel home by riding the rails or wondering where the crowds are that greeted vets after the victory in Europe but have moved on by the time the Pacific boys head home.

This was bad enough as far as some newspapers were concerned, but Mauldin really lost them when he continually focused on social issues. Mauldin skewered the prejudice that treated a returning vet as a Jap because of how he looked, never mind where he was born or where he fought. He mocked the VFW, at the time held hostage according to Mauldin by the soldiers of a different era who blocked moves to give WW II vets real say in the organization and then publicly supported hateful agendas like segregation that had nothing to do with the group as such. Mauldin could tease young college students fired up by social consciousness but turn around and be blistering over the vicious prejudice and hatred of lynching.

People turned away. Where were the easy laughs of Willie & Joe? Papers dropped him, even as Mauldin found the right voice to balance his heart with his humor. By December 31, 1946 it was all over. Willie & Joe were home but forgotten. Mauldin had just won the Pulitzer Prize one year earlier but no one wanted to hear him now. In the 1950s he would focus on editorial cartooning with great success. And Willie & Joe were still beloved by the greatest generation, given tribute by Charles Schulz in his Peanuts strip on Veterans Day in 1998. Willie & Joe and Mauldin made it onto a stamp in 2010, seven years after he died. And now Fantagraphics has captured Mauldin's most enduring characters in two releases that do him justice.

If Veterans Day proves the spur to dive into any of these books (or the many others I might have mentioned), then that's just one more reason to say thanks to the people who have served in the past and do so today.

BOOKS I'VE READ -- 2011

Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand *** 1/2
The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin ****
Two Adolescents by Alberto Moravia *** 1/2
King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard ** 1/2
Cart & Cwidder by Diana Wynne Jones ** 1/2
A Game Of Thrones by George R.R. Martin ****
A Clash Of Kings by George R.R. Martin ***1/2
Just A Dream by Chris Van Allsburg * 1/2
The Good Book: A Humanist Bible by A.C. Grayling ***
Dodsworth in Rome by Tim Egan ***
Prince Valiant Vol. 1: 1937-1938 by Hal Foster ***
Prince Valiant Vol. 2: 1939-1940 by Hal Foster ***
Prince Valiant Vol. 3: 1941-1942 by Hal Foster *** 1/2
A Storm Of Swords by George R.R. Martin *** 1/2
Queen Of The Falls by Chris Van Allsburg ** 1/2
A Feast For Crows by George R.R. Martin *** 1/2
The Greater Journey: Americans In Paris by David McCullough ***
The Great Night by Chris Adrian ** 1/2
Empire State Of Mind by Zack O'Malley Greenburg
The Little Red Pen by Janet Stevens & Susan Stevens Crummel * 1/2
21: The Story Of Roberto Clemente by Wilfred Santiago ** 1/2
The Siege Of Washington by John Lockwood & Charles Lockwood ***
Malcolm X; A Life Of Reinvention by Manning Marable ****
Dawn, Dusk or Night by Yasmina Reza ** 1/2
Unforgivable by Phillipe Djian **
On Being: A Scientist's Exploration Of The Great Questions Of Existence by Peter Atkins **
Mygale by Thierry Jonquet **
Berlin, 1961: Kennedy, Kruschev And The Most Dangerous Place On Earth by Frederick Kempe *** 1/2
High Strung: Bjorn Borg, John McEnroe and the Untold Story Of Tennis's Fiercest Rivalry by Stephen Tignor ** 1/2
Death At La Fenice by Donna Leon ** 1/2
Death In A Strange Country by Donna Leon ***
My Friend Flicka by Mary O'Hara ***
Drive by James Sallis **
The Magicians by Lev Grossman ***
The Magician King by Lev Grossman ** 1/2
The Buddha In The Attic by Julie Otsuka ****
Fly By Night by Frances Hardinage ***
Thunderhead by Mary O'Hara *** 1/2
The Hypnotist by Lars Kepler ** 1/2
Cocktail Hour Under The Tree Of Forgetfulness by Alexandra Fuller *** 1/2
East Of The West by Miroslav Penkov ***
Sum: Forty Tales From The Afterlives by David Eagleman ***
Green Grass Of Wyoming by Mary O'Hara ***
A Dance With Dragons by George R.R. Martin *** 1/2
Willie & Joe Back Home by Bill Mauldin ***
The Cut By George Pelecanos ** 1/2
Grand Pursuit by Sylvia Nasar ***/
A Matter For Men: War Of the Chtorrs by David Gerrold **
A Rage For Revenge: War Of The Chtorrs by David Gerrold * 1/2
The Shootist by Glendon Swarthout ***
Sea Of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh *** 1/2
River Of Smoke by Amitav Ghosh *** 1/2
When The Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka *** 1/2
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway *** 1/2
Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson *** 1/2
Cousins: A Memoir by Athol Fugard **
The Art Of Fielding by Chad Harbach ***
The Rings Of Saturn by W.G. Sebald ****
Siddhartha by Herman Hesse * 1/2
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides ** 1/2
John Henry Days by Colson Whitehead ***
Prince Valiant Vol. 4: 1943-1944 by Hal Foster ***
Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson ** 1/2
Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin ***
The House Of Silk by Anthony Horowitz ** 1/2
George F. Kennan: An American Life by John Lewis Gaddis ***

Thanks for reading. Michael Giltz is the co-host of Showbiz Sandbox, a weekly pop culture podcast that reveals the industry take on entertainment news of the day and features top journalists and opinion makers as guests. It's available free on iTunes. Visit Michael Giltz at his website and his daily blog.  Download his podcast of celebrity interviews and his radio show, also called Popsurfing and also available for free on iTunes. Link to him on Netflix and gain access to thousands of ratings and reviews. 


NOTE: Michael Giltz is provided with free copies of books to consider for review, including digital and physical galleys as well as final review copies. He typically does not guarantee coverage and invariably receives far more books than he can cover.

Books: The Return Of Sherlock Holmes

THE HOUSE OF SILK: A SHERLOCK HOLMES NOVEL BY ANTHONY HOROWITZ ($27.99; Mulholland Books/Little, Brown) ** 1/2 out of ****

It may seem to you that Sherlock Holmes has never left us. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's famed detective has inspired more fan fiction than almost any literary character in history, with acclaimed works ranging from The Seven Percent Solution by Nicholas Meyer to Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon's The Final Solution and Laurie R. King's ongoing series of mysteries, all inspired by that master of deduction. On TV, we have a fun new reboot from the BBC that places Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch) in the present day.

At the movies, we have Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law in tales filled with action set pieces that make them almost entirely unrecognizable as Holmesian. (Though Downey and Law would be great with better scripts.)



One could list thousands and thousands of short stories, novels, movies, plays, kids' books, games and so many more, all springing off from that Victorian hero. The Guinness World Records says Sherlock Holmes has been played in more movies by more actors than any other character in history.

But in fact Holmes has been officially quiet since Doyle laid down his pen. Now for the first time the estate of Doyle has authorized a new tale. The writer they selected was a good choice. Anthony Horowitz is the best-selling talent behind the Alex Rider novels (a teenage James Bond) and numerous other TV and book projects. Most notably, he created the marvelous mystery TV series Foyle's War. It was this intelligent, subtle show and its distinctive hero that surely won them over.

The book Horowitz has written is The House Of Silk: A Sherlock Holmes Novel ($27.99; Mulholland Books/Little, Brown). It is indeed fanboy fiction, a book firmly rooted in the style of Doyle, faithful to the character as created and with just enough wiggle room to allow the author to say all the things he's been longing to say about the world of 221B Baker Street. Who can blame him?



The House Of Silk is a novel, of course, making it a rarity among the official works. Doyle wrote four novels and 56 short stories and it was the short stories that turned Holmes into a superstar. Since he was delivering a novel, Horowitz was obliged to raise the stakes and make it a doozy, a case for the ages. If he had written say a dozen short stories, Horowitz perhaps might have felt freer to play with this world and create vivid sketches and scenes. With a novel, the weight of importance is heavy.

The House of Silk involves two strands, two mysteries that you will not be surprised to discover are linked. One involves the theft of paintings in America and an Irish gangster determined to avenge the death of his twin. The other strand involves corruption and evil at the highest levels of society and government, a conspiracy so cloaked in secrecy that not even Holmes has had an inkling of its existence till now.

As a fan, Horowitz delivers every set piece you would expect: the novel begins with Holmes greeting Watson with a flurry of observations that the spluttering fellow insists he explain, which of course Holmes does in his most elementary style. Horowitz moves on to depict Lestrade (not such a bad fellow, as Horowitz sees him), Mycroft Holmes, the Baker Street Irregulars, Professor Moriarty, fog, danger, disguises that we see through but Watson does not and even a nod to Mrs. Hudson (a wonderful woman and under-appreciated). If Horowitz missed a button to push, I've missed it too.

When the novel is not touring all the Holmes highlights like the docent of a museum, it is announcing its importance. Our narrator Dr. Watson repeatedly says things like "I will never forget the 50 minute vigil...." and just a few pages later, "I have never forgotten that night and its consequences."

The mystery itself is vile enough to support a novel and Holmes has some clever moments. If you're a fan, this is comfort food. It feeds your desire to see Holmes in a new tale but does not provide any insight or astonish you with its cleverness. Watson perhaps should not be quite so blind or naive at the end when wrapping up his tale, but the old fellow surely can't handle the monstrousness of what he's witnessed, so I'll let Horowitz off the hook by assuming that is what he meant rather than to show Watson as a little foolish.

If you're like me, you're helpless in the face of any decent Holmes adventure. If so, The House Of Silk will satisfy. If you prefer any new Holmes tale to leap ahead, to surprise and delight in unexpected ways, to offer new insight into the mind of this most vivid character, then you'd best stick with the canon.

BOOKS I'VE READ -- 2011

Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand *** 1/2
The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin ****
Two Adolescents by Alberto Moravia *** 1/2
King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard ** 1/2
Cart & Cwidder by Diana Wynne Jones ** 1/2
A Game Of Thrones by George R.R. Martin ****
A Clash Of Kings by George R.R. Martin ***1/2
Just A Dream by Chris Van Allsburg * 1/2
The Good Book: A Humanist Bible by A.C. Grayling ***
Dodsworth in Rome by Tim Egan ***
Prince Valiant Vol. 1: 1937-1938 by Hal Foster ***
Prince Valiant Vol. 2: 1939-1940 by Hal Foster ***
Prince Valiant Vol. 3: 1941-1942 by Hal Foster *** 1/2
A Storm Of Swords by George R.R. Martin *** 1/2
Queen Of The Falls by Chris Van Allsburg ** 1/2
A Feast For Crows by George R.R. Martin *** 1/2
The Greater Journey: Americans In Paris by David McCullough ***
The Great Night by Chris Adrian ** 1/2
Empire State Of Mind by Zack O'Malley Greenburg
The Little Red Pen by Janet Stevens & Susan Stevens Crummel * 1/2
21: The Story Of Roberto Clemente by Wilfred Santiago ** 1/2
The Siege Of Washington by John Lockwood & Charles Lockwood ***
Malcolm X; A Life Of Reinvention by Manning Marable ****
Dawn, Dusk or Night by Yasmina Reza ** 1/2
Unforgivable by Phillipe Djian **
On Being: A Scientist's Exploration Of The Great Questions Of Existence by Peter Atkins **
Mygale by Thierry Jonquet **
Berlin, 1961: Kennedy, Kruschev And The Most Dangerous Place On Earth by Frederick Kempe *** 1/2
High Strung: Bjorn Borg, John McEnroe and the Untold Story Of Tennis's Fiercest Rivalry by Stephen Tignor ** 1/2
Death At La Fenice by Donna Leon ** 1/2
Death In A Strange Country by Donna Leon ***
My Friend Flicka by Mary O'Hara ***
Drive by James Sallis **
The Magicians by Lev Grossman ***
The Magician King by Lev Grossman ** 1/2
The Buddha In The Attic by Julie Otsuka ****
Fly By Night by Frances Hardinage ***
Thunderhead by Mary O'Hara *** 1/2
The Hypnotist by Lars Kepler ** 1/2
Cocktail Hour Under The Tree Of Forgetfulness by Alexandra Fuller *** 1/2
East Of The West by Miroslav Penkov ***
Sum: Forty Tales From The Afterlives by David Eagleman ***
Green Grass Of Wyoming by Mary O'Hara ***
A Dance With Dragons by George R.R. Martin *** 1/2
Willie & Joe Back Home by Bill Mauldin ***
The Cut By George Pelecanos ** 1/2
Grand Pursuit by Sylvia Nasar ***/
A Matter For Men: War Of the Chtorrs by David Gerrold **
A Rage For Revenge: War Of The Chtorrs by David Gerrold * 1/2
The Shootist by Glendon Swarthout ***
Sea Of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh *** 1/2
River Of Smoke by Amitav Ghosh *** 1/2
When The Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka *** 1/2
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway *** 1/2
Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson *** 1/2
Cousins: A Memoir by Athol Fugard **
The Art Of Fielding by Chad Harbach ***
The Rings Of Saturn by W.G. Sebald ****
Siddhartha by Herman Hesse * 1/2
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides ** 1/2
John Henry Days by Colson Whitehead ***
Prince Valiant Vol. 4: 1943-1944 by Hal Foster ***
Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson ** 1/2
Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin ***
The House Of Silk by Anthony Horowitz ** 1/2

Thanks for reading. Michael Giltz is the co-host of Showbiz Sandbox, a weekly pop culture podcast that reveals the industry take on entertainment news of the day and features top journalists and opinion makers as guests. It's available free on iTunes. Visit Michael Giltz at his website and his daily blog.  Download his podcast of celebrity interviews and his radio show, also called Popsurfing and also available for free on iTunes. Link to him on Netflix and gain access to thousands of ratings and reviews. 


NOTE: Michael Giltz is provided with free copies of books to consider for review, including digital and physical galleys as well as final review copies. He typically does not guarantee coverage and invariably receives far more books than he can cover.

The Career Of Mantan Moreland -- A Poem

YOU CAN'T WIN (THE NAMES OF MANTAN MORELAND, ACTOR)

You can't win, Nightwatchman
Jefferson
Jeff
Jeff Jefferson
Jefferson "Jeff" Jackson
Jefferson "Jeff" Smith
Elevator boy
Jeff The Hotel Porter
Sam The Night Club Janitor
Shoeshine man
Red cap #2 (uncredited)
Birmingham Brown
Alabam
Barbershop Porter
Bartender
Subway rider
Messenger
Counterman
Waiter
Old man, you're out of luck


--Michael Giltz

Books: Marriage Plots, Baseball Woes, Economist Superheroes And The Opium Wars

Here's a quick roundup of four of the biggest books of the fall and which ones are worth your time.

THE MARRIAGE PLOT BY JEFFREY EUGENIDES ** 1/2 out of ****
THE ART OF FIELDING BY CHAD HARBACH ***
GRAND PURSUIT BY SYLVIA NASAR ***
RIVER OF SMOKE BY AMITAV GHOSH *** 1/2




THE MARRIAGE PLOT BY JEFFREY EUGENIDES ($28; Farrar, Straus and Giroux) ** 1/2

Can a "marriage plot" still drive a novel, wondered best-selling author Jeffrey Eugenides? It used to be a staple of fiction but now with women having careers and quickie divorces and pre-nups making marriage a matter of convenience, the choice of whom to marry doesn't have the same weighty impact for a woman that it did in the 1800s. Back then, it was often the single defining decision of their lives (if it was their choice at all). So will a marriage plot work today?

Of course it can, since the search for true love is still fraught with peril and desire. But it helps to have a heroine to root for. In his follow-up to the deservedly Pulitzer Prize-winning book Middlesex, Eugenides focuses on a collegiate love triangle.

Madeleine Hanna is an English major devoted to Jane Austen and George Eliot. Mitchell Grammaticus is the dopey childhood "friend" who has always loved her but never found quite the right moment to act. And Leonard Bankhead is a sexy, driven, compelling but fragile bad boy who is just the sort of damaged, highly medicated soul a woman can make her life's work. Eugenides is strong on Bankhead's mental breakdown and best of all Grammaticus' religious journey to India to find himself, where the novel truly comes to life.

Several problems here: Madeleine simply isn't a winning heroine. Worse, she's torn between two men and we can't help feeling that neither one is right for her (nor she for them). In effect, we're reading a novel in which we are hoping no one gets together. Well, a marriage plot can work, but a "please don't get married just yet" plot isn't quite so compelling.



THE ART OF FIELDING BY CHAD HARBACH ($25.99; Little, Brown) ***

One of the most hyped books of the year, Harbach's debut proves a genuine crowd-pleaser and smart commercial bet of the best sort. Comparisons to John Irving make sense since like Irving Harbach is a deceptively straightforward writer with a talent for character and narrative.

The story here is about a college baseball phenom named Henry Skrimshander. (The names in this book are so out there, it must be a sign that writers are running out of names for characters that can be cleared for use; maybe real people should rent out their names and provide a waiver?) Henry is a natural at shortstop and is spotted by Mike Schwartz, who soon recruits Henry to the tiny liberal arts Westish College.

Don't worry if you're not a fan of baseball. Harbach makes the joy of sport -- and specifically the pleasure of refining a skill and getting better and better at it -- universal for anyone. And this is not a novel that climaxes with the big game. (Though of course there is a big game.) It climaxes with a cast of characters and how they bounce off each other.

Henry's roommate is Owen Dunne, a casually out member of the baseball team who finds himself being wooed by the college President Guert Affenlight (!), heretofore happily heterosexual until Owen rocks his world. A widow, Guert is trying to reach out to his estranged daughter, who washes up on his shore after a collapsing marriage. The last thing Pella Affenlight wants is a relationship but the blunt, straightforward, determinedly caveman-like Mike Schwartz simply can't be denied.

A freak accident pushes Henry's ascent to the majors off course and derails everyone around him. Harbach captures the pressure of expectations that weigh down on Henry beautifully, down to the illogical but heartbreakingly believable eating disorder and self-destructive behavior that plagues the kid. Certain plot twists feel just like that -- artificial twists to gin up the excitement -- but Harbach rescues this by having his characters react movingly to them. Plus, he ends the novel on just the right note. So first time at bat he's scored a hit. Great. Now, like any ballplayer, we expect Harbach to do it again.



GRAND PURSUIT: THE STORY OF ECONOMIC GENIUS BY SYLVIA NASAR ($35; Simon & Schuster) ***

Despite policy makers and trouble makers (like Marx), I've always blithely considered economists to be people who describe and clarify the actions of the economy, rather than dramatically change it. But Sylvia Nasar's new book opened my eyes to the radical and powerful influence the men and women devoted to economics have had in the world, much of it for good. Her first book was the surprise bestseller A Beautiful Mind, a biography of John Nash that demonstrated Nasar's gift for elucidating complex mathematical ideas.

Here she turns that skill to a fascinating story on a much bigger canvas.  Like the popular histories of David McCullough and other acclaimed authors, Nasar's Grand Pursuit is chock-full of fascinating men and women and their stories, with one drama-filled account tumbling on top of another. She compellingly tells all their achievements as one overarching tale. Charles Dickens and Karl Marx (among others), bring to light the miserable conditions under which so many people lived and say, this needn't be. Beatrice Webb virtually invented the welfare state and proved that ensuring decent education, food and medical care would dramatically boost the private sector. Irving Fisher had the insight that governments that managed their money supply smartly would increase the likelihood of economic stability (a point echoed by Paul Krugman just today in discussing the European Union's debt crisis). And that's just in the first 170 pages.

It's not a dry recitation, either. Webb earnestly ventures into parts of London most proper women would never dream of seeing. Marx indulges in his own welfare state at the expense of Engels. Fisher's bout with tuberculosis (usually a killer in those days) took years to recover from and turned this academic into a crusader. Grand Pursuit is a very entertaining tale bursting with great stories, like the deftly painted scene at 78 Regent Street, the address where the first women to attend Oxford resided in bohemian splendor. Don't think for a moment you need to have a dog in the fight between Keynesians and the Chicago School to enjoy this book. You may not realize how dramatically the lives of so many people have improved in the last 200 years, but Nasar's Grand Pursuit will show you a major reason why and how it happened.



RIVER OF SMOKE BY AMITAV GHOSH ($28; Farrar, Straus and Giroux) *** 1/2

Whatever you do, DON'T read Amitav Ghosh's new novel River Of Smoke. It's the second book in a sprawling trilogy that began with the international bestseller Sea Of Poppies. By all means, dive into Sea Of Poppies and then you can read River Of Smoke. These two books are so artfully written, you will feel a sense of satisfying completion after each one, even though the story is going to be continued and you're eager to find out what happens next.

They're part of the Ibis trilogy, so-called because the books pivot on the journey of the Ibis, a ship that looms large in these tales. It might just as easily have been called the Opium Wars, since it is set in the early 1800s and leads up inexorably to that showdown between China and Great Britain, with India squeezed in the middle.

Where to begin? With the vision that reveals to an illiterate woman in a tiny village that she will embark on a voyage on the Ibis (even though she's never even seen a sailing ship like that before)? With the opium trader Bahram Modi, who has a gift for navigating the tricky politics of Canton and his dual existence at home and with his true love, a woman on a tiny boat who cooks for sailors? With the naturalist who ventures from England to discover if a fabled plant actually exists or is just the fantastical imaginings of an artist who wanted to beguile?

Ghosh is such an artist. Dickensian is the word the invariably springs to mind, because he has an endless supply of vivid characters and enough plot to keep all of them -- and dozens more -- dancing away for years. His talent for dialogue is especially remarkable for Ghosh is writing in English while capturing the distinctive patterns of both speech and the written word in a bygone era by people who might speak Mandarin or some Indian dialect but are using English to communicate with one another. His dialogue is musical, vivid, funny, utterly original and a sheer delight.

Sea Of Poppies was flawless. This second book does not disappoint, but you do see the gears of this massive tale move the story along here and there as Ghosh leaps from continent to continent and character to character. Pirates, romance, despair, love, suicide, fate, the gods, addiction, redemption and history -- it's all here. Can Ghosh bring his marvelous tale to a satisfying conclusion? If River Of Smoke is any indication, the answer is yes, if "satisfying" includes heartbreaking and moving. We may have to wait till 2014 to find out. But it's worth the wait and you've got two books to read and reread until then.

BOOKS I'VE READ -- 2011

Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand *** 1/2
The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin ****
Two Adolescents by Alberto Moravia *** 1/2
King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard ** 1/2
Cart & Cwidder by Diana Wynne Jones ** 1/2
A Game Of Thrones by George R.R. Martin ****
A Clash Of Kings by George R.R. Martin ***1/2
Just A Dream by Chris Van Allsburg * 1/2
The Good Book: A Humanist Bible by A.C. Grayling ***
Dodsworth in Rome by Tim Egan ***
Prince Valiant Vol. 1: 1937-1938 by Hal Foster ***
Prince Valiant Vol. 2: 1939-1940 by Hal Foster ***
Prince Valiant Vol. 3: 1941-1942 by Hal Foster *** 1/2
A Storm Of Swords by George R.R. Martin *** 1/2
Queen Of The Falls by Chris Van Allsburg ** 1/2
A Feast For Crows by George R.R. Martin *** 1/2
The Greater Journey: Americans In Paris by David McCullough ***
The Great Night by Chris Adrian ** 1/2
Empire State Of Mind by Zack O'Malley Greenburg
The Little Red Pen by Janet Stevens & Susan Stevens Crummel * 1/2
21: The Story Of Roberto Clemente by Wilfred Santiago ** 1/2
The Siege Of Washington by John Lockwood & Charles Lockwood ***
Malcolm X; A Life Of Reinvention by Manning Marable ****
Dawn, Dusk or Night by Yasmina Reza ** 1/2
Unforgivable by Phillipe Djian **
On Being: A Scientist's Exploration Of The Great Questions Of Existence by Peter Atkins **
Mygale by Thierry Jonquet **
Berlin, 1961: Kennedy, Kruschev And The Most Dangerous Place On Earth by Frederick Kempe *** 1/2
High Strung: Bjorn Borg, John McEnroe and the Untold Story Of Tennis's Fiercest Rivalry by Stephen Tignor ** 1/2
Death At La Fenice by Donna Leon ** 1/2
Death In A Strange Country by Donna Leon ***
My Friend Flicka by Mary O'Hara ***
Drive by James Sallis **
The Magicians by Lev Grossman ***
The Magician King by Lev Grossman ** 1/2
The Buddha In The Attic by Julie Otsuka ****
Fly By Night by Frances Hardinage ***
Thunderhead by Mary O'Hara *** 1/2
The Hypnotist by Lars Kepler ** 1/2
Cocktail Hour Under The Tree Of Forgetfulness by Alexandra Fuller *** 1/2
East Of The West by Miroslav Penkov ***
Sum: Forty Tales From The Afterlives by David Eagleman ***
Green Grass Of Wyoming by Mary O'Hara ***
A Dance With Dragons by George R.R. Martin *** 1/2
Willie & Joe Back Home by Bill Mauldin ***
The Cut By George Pelecanos ** 1/2
Grand Pursuit by Sylvia Nasar ***/
A Matter For Men: War Of the Chtorrs by David Gerrold **
A Rage For Revenge: War Of The Chtorrs by David Gerrold * 1/2
The Shootist by Glendon Swarthout ***
Sea Of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh *** 1/2
River Of Smoke by Amitav Ghosh *** 1/2
When The Emnperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka *** 1/2
The Sun Also Rises by Eernest Hemingway *** 1/2
Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson *** 1/2
Cousins: A Memoir by Athol Fugard **
The Art Of Fielding by Chad Harbach ***
The Rings Of Saturn by W.G. Sebald ****
Siddhartha by Herman Hesse * 1/2
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides ** 1/2
John Henry Days by Colson Whitehead ***
Prince Valiant Vol. 4: 1943-1944 by Hal Foster ***
Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson ** 1/2
Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin ***

Thanks for reading. Michael Giltz is the co-host of Showbiz Sandbox, a weekly pop culture podcast that reveals the industry take on entertainment news of the day and features top journalists and opinion makers as guests. It's available free on iTunes. Visit Michael Giltz at his website and his daily blog.  Download his podcast of celebrity interviews and his radio show, also called Popsurfing and also available for free on iTunes. Link to him on Netflix and gain access to thousands of ratings and reviews. 


NOTE: Michael Giltz is provided with free copies of books to consider for review, including digital and physical galleys as well as final review copies. He typically does not guarantee coverage and invariably receives far more books than he can cover.

Books: Prince Valiant's Glorious Return

PRINCE VALIANT VOLUME 1 1937-1938
PRINCE VALIANT VOLUME 2 1939-1940
PRINCE VALIANT VOLUME 3 1941-1942
PRINCE VALIANT VOLUME 4 1943-1944



One of the greatest comic strips of all time and a peak in visual splendor and breath-taking adventure, the story of Prince Valiant's 30+ year odyssey is getting a marvelous presentation in Fantagraphics' series of books, which just reached Volume 4 ($29.95 each; Fantagraphics).

You can dive in anywhere, but if you're like me -- someone entirely new to this tale -- it makes sense to begin at the beginning. In Hal Foster's masterpiece, you'll discover the handsome and willful young prince in the days of King Arthur, a winning lad who is brave, strong, clever, conceited, a little brash and boastful but just as quick to apologize for his follies. Valiant will laugh at himself just as often as he laughs at anyone else. What might surprise modern readers is the relative complexity of Valiant, who grows and matures subtly over the years. The strip is violent, sexy, serious, droll and above all eye-catching.

Foster made his bones with a comic strip about Tarzan and clearly learned a thing or two about storytelling from Edgar Rice Burroughs and other antecedents like Ivanhoe. But the great power of a comic strip is the combination of character and story and visual flair. No one before or since has had a more exacting and lively eye for detail and historical accuracy than Foster.

Prince Valiant appeared only on Sundays in full color and Foster's sweeping ambition explodes off the page. The real estate he was given to play with on Sundays contained 12 square panels, but Foster juggled them with aplomb. Each panel is filled with subtle color, sweeping vistas and characters with movement and individuality (no one creates more vivid crowd and battle scenes than Foster). And at dramatically important moments, Foster will expand his vision and have an image take over the space of two or four panels or enlarge one square to center the action marvelously. If Valiant reaches the top of a hill and spots a castle in the distance, that castle will appear with the majesty of a cinematic shot straight from David Lean. If Valiant jumps off a cliff to avoid danger, you catch your breath as he tumbles down, down, down the entire side of the page towards the bottom.

Prince Valiant is great fun from the start, but it really comes into its own in Volume 3. Now in Volume 4, Valiant is determined to seek out Queen Aleta of the Misty Isles, the one woman who has bewitched this red-blooded lad. The series is filled with quests but this is the granddaddy of them all -- it stretches over an 18 month period in all.

Each volume is bookended with some fascinating detail about Foster and the series, whether it's a biographical sketch of the creator, reprints of how some panels deemed too violent or sexy were actually shown to readers at the time (needless to say, the originals are in the volume) and so on. Volume 4 is intriguing because it appeared during WW II when a paper shortage struck the country. Foster knew space was at a premium so he only used two thirds of the page for his strip and imagined editors might want to use the bottom third for some other property. He filled the space with another tale called The Medieval Castle which depicted life in a castle through the eyes of two young princes. It's illuminating to see how deftly Foster fills the strip with details about said life and how a siege actually worked. But Foster needn't have bothered: his tales were so popular almost every newspaper included Foster's entire offering, including The Medieval Castle, which appears here along the bottom of the last 1/4 of the book just as it did in newspapers.

It's intriguing to imagine what Foster might have done with a digital strip, one that could present a battlefield scene on a tablet where the reader could scroll from side to side to capture an entire panorama or maybe scroll down and down even more dramatically than in a newspaper. But these oversized volumes which are 14 inches tall and 10.4 inches wide are far bigger and more dramatic than any tablet. The pleasure of how solidly and carefully they're made is part of the pleasure of reading them. You feel like a little kid as you prop the giant volume up and literally dive into the tale that fills your vision, much as kids and adults did more than 70 years ago. It's a worthy presentation for one of the most important and entertaining works in comic strip history.

Thanks for reading. Michael Giltz is the co-host of Showbiz Sandbox, a weekly pop culture podcast that reveals the industry take on entertainment news of the day and features top journalists and opinion makers as guests. It's available free on iTunes. Visit Michael Giltz at his website and his daily blog.  Download his podcast of celebrity interviews and his radio show, also called Popsurfing and also available for free on iTunes. Link to him on Netflix and gain access to thousands of ratings and reviews. 


NOTE: Michael Giltz is provided with free copies of books to consider for review, including digital and physical galleys as well as final review copies. He typically does not guarantee coverage and invariably receives far more books than he can cover.

Books: "The Buddha In The Attic" Is A Find

THE BUDDHA IN THE ATTIC **** out of ****
By Julie Otsuka
$22; Knopf

I read this book in one gulp on a plane flight from London back to New York City. Then I went out and bought author Julie Otsuka's debut novel When The Emperor Was Divine. Then when the final hardcover edition of The Buddha In The Attic appeared in my mail, I read it again. It comes in a trim, smaller format that's perfect for this precise, focused work of just 129 penetrating pages. The jacket design by Gabriele Wilson is clever and eye-catching, the prose almost forces you to use words like "gem" and "pearl" and it has that feel of a book destined to become a bestseller. See it and you'll want to pick it up. Start reading it and you won't want to put it down.

But this suggests a modest endeavor when Otsuka's novel is anything but. It's a boldly imagined work that takes a stylistic risk more daring and exciting than many brawnier books five times its size. Even the subject matter is daring, for Otsuka's acclaimed debut told a story about the internment camps where Americans of Japanese descent were forced to relocate, uprooting and destroying their lives while Americans with German or Italian descent were essentially left alone. That book became a bestseller and quickly worked its way onto high school reading lists, which is a testament to the book's accessible prose. The subject matter surprised me, for Otsuka's new book leads up to that same, shameful event in American history.

That's where the similarities end. Emperor gathers strength by focusing on one family: a husband who is dragged away in the middle of the night; the wife he left behind and their two children, the three of whom are sent together to a camp.

In contrast, The Buddha In The Attic takes place in the decades between the wars. Instead of one family, it focuses on a community of Japanese picture brides who travel to San Francisco to be married off to husbands they've never met before. The distant, reserved voice of the narrator mirrors the reserve of many of these women overwhelmed by a new world, a new culture and of course married life itself. It begins on the ship taking these bewildered, excited, nervous, brave and scared women on the longest journey of their lives.

On the boat we were mostly virgins. We had long black hair and flat wide feet and we were not very tall. Some of us had eaten nothing but rice gruel as young girls and had slightly bowed legs, and some of us were only fourteen years old and were still young girls ourselves. Some of us came from the city and wore stylish city clothes, but many more of us came from the country and on the boat we wore the same old kimonos we'd been wearing for years -- faded hand-me-downs from our sisters that had been patched and redyed many times. Some of us came from the mountains, and had never before seen the sea, except for in pictures, and some of us were the daughters of fishermen who had been around the sea all our lives. Perhaps we had lost a brother or father to the sea, or a fiance, or perhaps someone we loved had jumped into the water one unhappy morning and simply swum away, and now it was time for us, too, to move on.

This mesmerizing opening paragraph shows Otsuka's approach at its best: specific, clear, multitudinous in its grasp and subtly emotional. She maintains this level throughout. Some of the girls flirt with sailors on the boat, some get seasick, some feel fine right away, some are worried that their husbands will realize they're not "fresh" and all of their thoughts and desires and fears are captured in prose. The book follows them off the boat and slowly, almost to your shock, you realize that Otsuka is not going to focus on one or two women or even five or ten. She keeps her eye on the entire community, never once letting anyone fall from her grasp.

This sounds like it should be frustrating. Off the boat, some of the women are working the fields alongside their husbands, others are beaten cruelly and run away, some work in town as maids for white women, others work as prostitutes, some are happy, some are sad, some are not sure how they feel. At every step, the women make decisions (or those decisions are made for them) and that takes them off into an entirely new world of possibilities. And then it happens again and again, a constant branching out of lives and Otsuka limns them all.

This is remarkable on several levels. On the level of pure craftsmanship, it's exciting to see a writer make such a bold move and succeed so brilliantly -- like watching a juggler who keeps adding ball after ball to the stream of objects they keep in the air. Each vignette, each story is so riveting, you want to stay with that character. But Otsuka moves on. If at any moment the next story and character wasn't so enthralling, you would immediately resent this and want to return to the previous thread. But that literally never happens, You're pulled inexorably forward by wave after wave of event.

On another level, it's an exceptionally appropriate way to capture the lives of immigrants. By refusing to focus on one or two or even a dozen "typical" people (a lesser writer would have three or four main characters, with one bride heading to the city, one to the country, one off on her own and one into prostitution), by constantly unfolding the endless possibilities of life, Otsuka reminds us that the immigrant story will always be immigrant stories. They're as varied and wonderful and heartbreaking as anyone else's life and never follow a set pattern.

Looming over it all is World War II and the internment camps we know are coming. This is quietly devastating because Otsuka has done such a masterful job of showing us how specific and varied and diverse all these people are. So when they're suddenly and brutally treated as foreigners, lumped together no matter how dramatically different they may be from one another, the injustice of it is doubly striking.

Few writers this year will take the risks that Otsuka does in The Buddha In The Attic. And I doubt any of them will do it in a novel so accessible and rich that it's sure to be a favorite for casual readers and critics alike.

Thanks for reading. Michael Giltz is the co-host of Showbiz Sandbox, a weekly pop culture podcast that reveals the industry take on entertainment news of the day and features top journalists and opinion makers as guests. It's available free on iTunes. Visit Michael Giltz at his website and his daily blog.  Download his podcast of celebrity interviews and his radio show, also called Popsurfing and also available for free on iTunes. Link to him on Netflix and gain access to thousands of ratings and reviews. 


NOTE: Michael Giltz is provided with free copies of books to consider for review. He typically does not guarantee coverage and invariably receives far more books than he can cover.

Books: Cheers For Alexandra Fuller's "Cocktail Hour..."

COCKTAIL HOUR UNDER THE TREE OF FORGETFULNESS *** 1/2 out of ****
BY ALEXANDRA FULLER

You may have lost track of author Alexandra Fuller. Her debut memoir -- Don't Lets Go To The Dogs Tonight -- was a rollicking, bestseller about Fuller's childhood in war-torn Africa with parents so much larger-than-life that they made the phrase "larger-than-life" seem rather puny. It was compulsively readable and funny and sharp. The book was very much an expected hit in my mind, despite the long odds of gaining a wide audience.

A sequel involving mercenaries slipped by quietly and Fuller also delivered a well-reviewed look at a Wyoming man who worked on oil rigs and fell prey to the indifferent safety records of the companies that run them.

But now Fuller has returned to the source in Cocktail Hour Under The Tree Of Forgetfulness. The source is not just her childhood but her parents and specifically her mother: Nicola Fuller of Central Africa. Mum always wanted to be the heroine of a story but Fuller's memoir was a bit too spot-on and became ever after that Awful Book. Well, now Nicola has an Awful Book of her own, in essence a biography that captures her eccentric, quixotic and downright dangerous tale with full room for humor, love and more than a few highballs.

It begins with Nicola cajoling her Dashing Little Sri Lankan into some pilot lessons so she can fly and land a plane (planes being a constant in the sort of rollicking life Nicola imagines for herself a la Out Of Africa, West With The Night and so on). Soon we flashblack to Nicola's childhood in Scotland, where the family war cry was -- when translated from Gaelic to English -- "Gainsay who dare." This captures Fuller's puckish but loving tone perfectly:

It took me a while to recover from the discovery that my Mum's family had a war cry, but then I thought about Mum and I realized that if you didn't have a war cry to go with that attitude, you'd have to invent one. During the bush war in Rhodesia Mum forwent her family's Gaelic war cry and took up a personal war cry. It was borrowed from [pop star[ Cliff Richard] and the Shadows and was about being a bandit from Brazil, being the quickest on the trigger and shooting to kill, which was about the extent of Mum's interest in the lyrics. In fact, she quite often didn't make it past the opening word - a loudly shouted "Ole!," which kept it simple for everyone who did not speak Gaelic but confused those of us who spoke absolutely no Spanish. [My sister] Vanessa and I translated the word as "Hooray!" But the meaning was clear either way. My mother was here, she was armed, and you bet your insurrecting Commie ass she was dangerous."

The tale rockets back and forth charmingly, with Nicola's childhood bumping up against Alexandra's current visits to holy family sites, with Mum's dreaded childhood fancy dress parties not preventing her from forcing similar ghastly arrangements on her own children, with the added frisson that you might be dressed up in some silly costume and bouncing down the road to a party but in Rhodesia you better be packing a gun in case rebels decided to attack.

Fuller shows her parents at old age, finally perhaps discovering a resting place in Zambia where they and the land and the people are at an uneasy peace of sorts. By that time we better understand a woman who attended boarding school and whose best friend as a child might have been a chimp, a woman who blithely champions people like Che Guevara (you know who she admires because she names her pets after them) but can't be bothered with "the people" themselves in all their pushy reality. Tragedy, war, struggle, lost children, hunting parties, lost wars, hasty retreats, lost countries, bouts of depression or madness or going "wobbly" if you prefer, and many many drinks -- war-ravaged Africa is, if not romantic, unquestionably vivid in these pages.

"Here's to us," goes one of Nicola's toasts. "There's none like us and if there were, they're all dead." Fuller brings her mother's world and society fully to life here, as wonderfully as she did in Don't Let's Go To The Dogs Tonight. If you liked that book, don't hesitate. If you're a fan of West With The Night or Out Of Africa, here's a far more complicated and modern look at the continent in all its bloody, confusing and addictive glory. Now no mucking about: Fuller's next memoir better be an Awful Book about her dad.

Thanks for reading. Michael Giltz is the cohost of Showbiz Sandbox, a weekly pop culture podcast that reveals the industry take on entertainment news of the day and features top journalists and opinion makers as guests. It's available for free on iTunes. Visit Michael Giltz at his website and his daily blog.  Download his podcast of celebrity interviews and his radio show, also called Popsurfing and also available  for free on iTunes. Link to him on Netflix and  gain access to thousands of ratings and reviews.

Note: Michael Giltz was provided with a free copy of the book in advance of publication. He receives far more books than he can cover, so they are provided without any guarantee of coverage.

"On Alfred Pond" Is Back!

Guest blogger Peter McClain has been away far too long with his musings on life in upstate New York. But a week volunteering at Vacation Bible School prompted Pete to put pen to paper (or is that "index finger to keyboard"? and share some tales far from Lake Wobegon but rather closer to Alfred, New York. (By the way, for those of you on the coasts, Vacation Bible School is like summer camp for evangelicals.)


ON ALFRED POND: VACATION BIBLE SCHOOL ROCKS!

By Peter McClain

Vacation Bible School (VBS) invaded Alfred Pond last week and yours truly was involved. I'd been able to hide behind Micah these past three years when volunteers were requested since we didn't want to stick him in the nursery for 3 hours every night for a week and being the dutiful dad I stayed home with him. Unfortunately, kids grow up (no matter how well you've malnourished them) and thus Micah was old enough to attend his first VBS. So, I volunteered to accompany a pre-K group through the nightly activities, which made me the only male crew leader of the youngest set. That, of course, made me a magnet for the most hyperactive boys searching for a father figure.

A night of VBS consists of an opening act where you sing some of the most mind-numbing songs (and "songs" is really a stretch since a better description would be "singing a chorus 10 to 12 times with a bridge tossed in if you're lucky"), craft time, bible story time, snack, craft, a section of a poorly produced 5-part movie (since something needs to keep these kids attention while they wait for Google+ to emerge from beta testing), and Rowdy Wrap-up, which is the same songs sung yet again. Needless to say, I woke up all week singing these choruses to the point where I was excited when Anne Murray's "Shadows in the Moonlight" was in my head Saturday morning.

This year's theme was Pandamania, which has about as much Biblical relevance as ice skating or a 3-foot tall, talking chipmunk, but we'll get to that later. I'm thinking the theme was dreamed up during the winter with an eye on the opening of Kung Fu Panda 2 Memorial Day weekend, fully expecting that Jack Black's form of crude humor would dominate the summer. Alas, that was not to be and we were left with a weird Asain theme and a play off the word pandemonium.

The curriculum connects a Bible story for each day, some of which work extremely well, like the stomach of a whale which was constructed out of large, black plastic sheets and inflated with two box fans. Others, missed the mark like the game Shark Attack the pre-K kids played where each child placed their legs under a parachute while a "shark" arbitrarily pulled the unsuspecting participants under. Within about 15 seconds the kids realized that they didn't want their legs anywhere under the parachute. Somehow that was supposed to teach us about Hannah. The closest I could come was perhaps the shark represented the temple priest who accused Hannah of being drunk. I wonder if drunk praying was the Biblical times version of drunk texting and the Levitical priests got tired of God honoring the incoherent prayers of the drunken yeshiva kids who came to the temple late at night. Anyway, we ended up playing Simon Says and Red Light, Green Light so I'm not sure the lesson landed.

Another staple of VBS is letting the kids all yell some phrase any time point of the day is spoken which is oddly similar to the word of the day on Pee-Wee's Playhouse with mobs of kids all screaming because everyone else is. I like to make a game out of this by finding the times when the daily phrase, such as "God watches over us" is said in mid-sentence when they aren't looking for the typical response. Especially humorous is interjecting a boisterous "Thank you, God!" during dialog in the 5-part movie which stars a 3-foot tall chipmunk named Chadder. SPOILER ALERT: The Pandamania version of Chadder's mystery series takes him to a panda preserve where all the pandas go missing and while helping he ends up getting spray painted white and placing his paws in black paint before wiping his eyes with said painted paws. The inspector loses his glasses and thinks Chadder is a talking panda until Chadder gets cleaned up and tells the truth. The culprit is the pink-clad daughter who can't stand pandas so much that she hides them in her room where we get to see the 5 worst CGI pandas in the history of moving pictures. They'd have been better off photoshopping in five pandas from a zoo. Just dreadful.

The highlights of the week were the unpredictable answers which the pre-K kids gave to serious questions asked by station leaders. On the first day, during Chadder's Theater with the day's theme being creation, my Micah was asked what his favorite animal was. His answer? Racecar. And why not?!? You think a cheetah's fast? See what 750 ponies under the hood can do! Later in the week, when asked during Bible Adventures what he wanted to be when he grew up, Micah emphatically answered, "Car." There's a kid who won't put God in a box!

Anyway, the week ended without any major incidents and the kids seemed to enjoy themselves, so I think it was a success. And I was able to escape the repetitive choruses which haunted my subconscious last week. That is, until yesterday's morning service where they invited the kids forward to sing a few of their tunes and thus I woke up this morning with those same refrains echoing through my brain. Time to turn on Pandora and hope for the best...

--30 -- (COPYRIGHT 2011 BY PETER MCCLAIN)

Thanks for sharing, Pete. Don't keep us waiting so long for your next column.

Books: "The Hypnotist: -- Wait For It -- Mesmerizes

THE HYPNOTIST By Lars Kepler ** 1/2 out of ****
$27 hardcover; 512 pages
Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux

This new mystery thriller comes from a husband and wife team based in Sweden, so naturally it's being compared to The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. But this is really an international book written for an international audience. It's movie ready with short chapters, vivid characters and enough twists and turns to keep pages turning.

Many mysteries feature damaged heroes but what may give this debut novel by the pseudonym Lars Kepler its own flair is the fact that virtually every character is deeply damaged in one way or another. Our hero is Detective Joona Linna. He's haunted by a tragic car accident and now simply cannot, will not rest until a case is solved. Linna also suffers from blinding headaches but when a case is on he skips his meds and lets the pain mount and mount so nothing distracts from the task at hand. He's so single-minded that Linna often leaves his glamorous girlfriend alone.

Linna is dragged into solving an horrific crime in which almost an entire family is brutally murdered but a 15 year old boy survives with hundreds of stab wounds. Time is running out because the boy's sister may be in danger and can't be found, but the boy is is barely capable of being questioned in the normal way. So Linna calls in...The Hypnotist.

That would be Dr. Erik Maria Bark. He swore never to use hypnosis again after some tragic event that haunts him. (Rest assured, we'll hear about it in detail.) Bark is addicted to painkillers and not sleeping with his beautiful wife, who hasn't forgiven him for a brief affair many years earlier. Their son is also wounded in a way: he suffers from a rare blood disease that means he must get weekly injections and can still die if jostled around too casually. The boy is finally dating a goth girl, who seems to be trying to pull away from a gang of aimless youth that terrorize the kids in their neighborhood. But are his parent too protective to let him have any fun?

When Bark is reluctantly pressured into using hypnosis in this crisis situation, you won't be surprised to hear it all spirals out of control. The madman who attacked that family is revealed and on the hunt. The missing sister is found but never feels safe. Bark's use of hypnosis makes national news and Amnesty International weighs in on his barbaric tactics. And then the hypnotist's son is kidnapped and any one of several terrifying suspects could be responsible. Soon we're plunged back into the past and Bark's controversial group hypnosis therapy sessions. He brought together all sorts of damaged souls, one of whom may be targeting him now for the sins of the past.

It's all pretty entertaining stuff, though regular readers of mysteries won't be thrown off by the red herrings. Mind you, herring served at a Christmas party and unusual street names are the only clues that this is set in Sweden. Either world culture is becoming unified or this book is geared towards a world audience. Certainly disaffected teens and psychopaths are the same the world over. A few missteps are soon brushed aside. (Early on, when a psycho has vowed to kill Dr. Bark and/or his family, wouldn't the cops simply go to Bark's home rather than just leave some frantic phone messages and leave it at that?) It's lean, amiable beach reading with Linna not quite center stage (much of the book is devoted to Bark and others) but an interesting character nonetheless. He has one annoyingly endearing quirk: Linna is always right and when he's doubted and proven right, he feels compelled to make his coworkers admit he was right and then says, "I told you so."

When this book becomes a bestseller and we get a sequel, just take it for granted that I'm thinking the same thing: I was right and I told you so.

*****
Thanks for reading. Michael Giltz is the cohost of Showbiz Sandbox, a weekly pop culture podcast that reveals the industry take on entertainment news of the day and features top journalists and opinion makers as guests. It's available free on iTunes. Visit Michael Giltz at his website and his daily blog.  Download his podcast of celebrity interviews and his radio show, also called Popsurfing and also available for free on iTunes. Link to him on Netflix and gain access to thousands of ratings and reviews.

NOTE: Michael Giltz was provided with a free copy of this book in galley and final form. He receives far more books than he can cover and does not guarantee to review or write about any particular one.

Books: David McCullough's Latest Tackles Americans In Paris

THE GREATER JOURNEY: AMERICANS IN PARIS BY DAVID MCCULLOUGH *** out of ****
$37.50 hardcover; SIMON & SCHUSTER

In 1831, Samuel Morse returned to Paris to begin what he believed would be the crowning achievement of his life. Not the telegraph -- that would come later. Morse went straight to the Louvre to begin a painting. One decade earlier he had produced House Of Representatives, a grand scale work that depicted the seat of American democracy and featured some 80 people of note within it. It was very typical of a certain type of "ambitious" art that would eventually fall out of favor.

This new work was in the same vein but even bolder. At the very least, it was bigger, measuring 6 feet by 9 feet -- if size meant anything at all to an American, why wouldn't it? The subject was the Louvre itself: Morse would capture a great hall of the famed museum and include 38 of his favorites works, including Da Vinci's Mona Lisa. Morse's great friend, the writer James Fennimore Cooper, could barely keep himself away and returned day after day to chart the painter's progress.

This style of painting -- one piece containing many smaller but bravura works or portraits within it -- is exactly the model for author and historian David McCullough's new book The Greater Journey: Americans In Paris. McCullough looks at the many artists, scientists, people of medicine and thinkers who made the voyage back across the Atlantic to find inspiration and knowledge in the City of Lights from roughly 1830 to the end of the century.




The Paris of the 1920s -- when Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald romanticized the life of the expat -- seems almost a backwater when compared to the flood of people that came there during these six decades.

• Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. relished his medical studies in Paris while McCullough deftly displays both how Paris was the center of medical knowledge at that time and how the Americans who studied there would revolutionize care when they returned to the U.S.




• Painter Mary Cassatt wasn't exactly embraced by Paris; women had a tough row to hoe there as much as they would in the U.S. But Cassatt found admirers of her work (not, sadly, including her own family) and would return at a low point and find her greatest inspiration with Degas and the Impressionists.




• The son of an immigrant cobbler, Augustus Saint-Gaudens came to Paris at the age of 19 and worked his way up from crafting cameos to major commissions as a sculptor.




• Charles Sumner came to study medicine but got his real education in race relations. He was astonished to see black students working alongside white ones and it came like a revelation to him that the bigoted attitude towards blacks in America was not the order of things but simply dumb ignorance. Sumner would prove an ardent abolitionist and be nearly beaten to death on the floor of the Senate over his denunciation of slavery.


The stories keep coming, almost to their detriment. After a while, the tale of an American coming to Paris, falling in love with the city, finding themselves artistically or philosophically and moving on to great success does begin to blur a bit. In fact, The Great Journey does not have the compelling through-line of most of McCullough's major works, like The Path Between The Seas (about the building of the Panama Canal) or his biographies (Truman, John Adams).

But the spine that keeps you moving forward is McCullough's pocket history of Paris during one of its most remarkable and bloody eras. He sketches the Franco-Prussian war (in which McCullough shines with his depiction of American Ambassador Elihu Washburne and the man's steady and sober presence that saved many lives) to the horrors of the Commune.

McCullough might have focused just on "The Medicals," as he calls the many Americans who traveled to Paris for a proper education in medicine, returning the favor with their assistance during some of the bloodletting that century would feature. Their tales are some of the freshest and most unusual to be found here. But the book is bursting with such fascinating side-paths, and it would be churlish to call it over-stuffed with diversions. And yet, the stories do begin to lose their impact with so many of them being so similar in their broad outlines.

Like Morse's The Gallery Of The Louvre, McCullough fills his new book with deft mini-portraits of numerous figures and gives them the dramatic history of Paris during the 1800s as a canvas. The Greater Journey may not reach the greatness of his best, more focused works. But it will satisfy his fans and send the curious off into a dozen directions to learn more about these people. And, if they're lucky, on a pilgrimage to Paris.




*****
Thanks for reading. Michael Giltz is the cohost of Showbiz Sandbox, a weekly pop culture podcast that reveals the industry take on entertainment news of the day and features top journalists and opinion makers as guests. It's available free on iTunes. Visit Michael Giltz at his website and his daily blog.  Download his podcast of celebrity interviews and his radio show, also called Popsurfing and also available for free on iTunes. Link to him on Netflix and gain access to thousands of ratings and reviews.

NOTE: Michael Giltz was provided with a free copy of this book in galley and final form. He receives far more books than he can cover and does not guarantee to review or write about any particular one.

Books: "Berlin 1961 -- The Most Dangerous Place On Earth"

BERLIN 1961: KENNEDY, KRUSCHEV AND THE MOST DANGEROUS PLACE ON EARTH ($29.95; GP Putnam's Sons) *** 1/2 out of ****
BY FREDERICK KEMPE

In 1961, the United States and the Soviet Union -- allies together during World War II -- faced off militarily for the first time over the fate of Berlin. The young John F. Kennedy (reeling from the Bay of Pigs) and the peasant turned politician Nikita Kruschev (who kept one eye on opponents in the Politburo and another on China) knew that Berlin was crucial.

If the US couldn't hold fast here, the countries that depended on it for protection from the ever-growing communist empire would lose faith. If the Soviet Union couldn't stop the bleeding (all of the best and brightest in East Germany were fleeing to the more vibrant West Germany literally by the thousands each and every day) then the ability to keep the Eastern bloc stable and secure was threatened. Even the USSR itself might not last if countries like Poland and Germany and Hungary began to peel off one by one.

Literally everything was at stake in Berlin, including the prospect of nuclear war. The US didn't have nearly enough troops to match the boots on the ground that the Russians deployed in East Germany. And now that the Soviets could boast of their own nuclear capability, Kruschev was certain Kennedy would never risk a nuclear winter just to keep Berlin free and open. Kennedy was just as certain he had to convince Kruschev the US would use nuclear weapons or the only way to keep the Soviets at bay would be to literally launch Armageddon.

This tense turning point of the Cold War is captured effectively with Frederick Kempe's page-turning book, a solid work of popular history that should be one of the breakout titles of the year. First and foremost, Kempe dives into his rich narrative that plots the back and forth between the superpowers month to month and day to day. Quick, vivid sketches of the state of the mind of the two world leaders are interspersed with dramatic details of the men and women caught up in history.

Kempe shows us the nervous young student who takes a risk and smuggles a passport into East Germany so a friend can escape; the old woman who dangles from a window towards freedom because her front door opens onto East Germany but her back window looks out to the West; and the tragic people caught on the wrong side when the Berlin Wall is thrown up overnight, the ones who realize they planned to leave one day too late.

We also get the secret backdoor channel that went from a mid-level Soviet spy to Bobby Kennedy and the loose cannon of a US general who knows the commies won't back down until you punch them in the nose and he's just the guy to do it.

Kempe's analysis draws on reams of material and solidly places the decisions of Kennedy and Kruschev in convincing context. Kennedy struggled to prove to Kruschev that he was hard-nosed. But no matter how often Kennedy said Berlin was of vital importance, Kruschev refused to believe it could be that important to them. That meant they edged closer and closer to the brink. Still, from the context of today, Kennedy's take on events seem reasonable and balanced from the start.

He was famously overshadowed by Kruschev at a summit meeting that led into the Berlin crisis. Aides were aghast to hear all the concessions Kennedy blithely offered up. But in fact, everything Kennedy said and the stance he took became the de facto US position throughout the Cold War. Kennedy repeatedly made clear the US wouldn't interfere with whatever the Soviet Union did in East Germany. He acknowledged the facts on the ground of Eastern Europe and accepted it as a fait accompli. Kennedy knew the people of the US weren't remotely ready to go to war over unifying Germany, the country they had just defeated after it launched a world war. And Kennedy was right.

Kempe details the almost miraculous feat of East Germany throwing up a barrier overnight throughout the entire city of Berlin, a barrier that would soon become the Berlin Wall. It's a remarkable moment bursting with tragedy and small moments of grace. As callous as it may seem, Kennedy was relieved by its appearance. He knew the Soviets had to stop the flow of refugees that were soon going to cripple East Germany for good and threatened its entire bloc. If the USSR hadn't allowed the wall, war might very well have come about.

This doomed East Germany and indeed the Eastern bloc to decades of Soviet control. But it also stabilized a dangerous military showdown. Kennedy also knew it symbolized defeat for the totalitarian regime of communism. Any country that must wall in its own citizens and threaten to shoot them if they try to leave is doomed to fail. Thirty years might seem a long time to wait for that to happen, but in historic terms it's a blink of the eye. Kennedy was right.

Kempe captures this dramatic moment with skill and verve, showing how the Berlin crisis arose out of the turmoil of recent months and why it led to the white knuckle events of the Cuban missile crisis soon thereafter. Entertaining and insightful, Berlin 1961 offers all the pleasures of John Le Carre with the added frisson that the dangers were all too real and the stakes never higher.



*****
Thanks for reading. Michael Giltz is the cohost of Showbiz Sandbox, a weekly pop culture podcast that reveals the industry take on entertainment news of the day and features top journalists and opinion makers as guests. It's available free on iTunes. Visit Michael Giltz at his website and his daily blog.  Download his podcast of celebrity interviews and his radio show, also called Popsurfing and also available for free on iTunes. Link to him on Netflix and gain access to thousands of ratings and reviews.