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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
NONFICTION
Borrowed Finery
By Paula Fox
212 pages
Henry Holt
It's a hard-knock life novelist Paula Fox recounts in this memoir, from being farmed out to a series of foster homes (in New York, Cuba, Hollywood) by her feckless parents to enduring the implacable enmity of her baffling mother to struggling as a young woman to survive in crummy jobs during the 1940s and '50s, but this is no tale of woe. In fact, the tale is almost beside the point; "Borrowed Finery" consists of some of the most perfect prose published last year, as pristine and silvery as a mountain brook in the moonlight. It's sometimes tempting just to let Fox's pure sentences wash over you and rinse away the trashy, ephemeral jangle of contemporary life, but then you'd miss the author's sly, ruthless wit and the way the young Paula's subterranean rages build slowly to a conclusion all the more terrible for its understatement.
John Adams
By David McCullough
751 pages
Simon & Schuster
The unlikely runaway success of this biography has drawn a host of quibblers and revisionists out of the woodwork. So be it; when it comes to interpreting the facts, history is really a matter of dueling stories, and whether or not our second president can be fairly called a "hypercritical pedant" or "narcissist" as some have claimed, without a doubt David McCullough tells the best story. He picks a tough row to hoe, seeking to make an appealing hero out of a rotund little Puritan who preferred his Massachusetts farm to the hurly-burly of the city. Even the celebrated matrimonial devotion of Adams and his wife, Abigail, while endearing and inspiring to some, lacks the tortured romanticism that makes the emotional lives of leaders like Jefferson so fascinating. Fortunately, Adams was right at the center of the greatest adventure of the past 300 years -- the founding of the American republic -- and McCullough makes you feel the precarious nature of the whole enterprise: the crushing odds, the desperate military retreats, the hazardous journeys by sea and land, the seeming impossibility of getting all the squabbling colonial ducks in a row, the vision demanded of those who seek to invent a government from scratch.
Seabiscuit: An American Legend
By Laura Hillenbrand
399 pages
Random House
Everyone had more or less given up on him, this homely racehorse with stubby legs from the wrong side of the Mississippi, and the two men who pledged to make a champion out of him were a couple of hard-luck cases themselves. By the time all three were done, Seabiscuit was the most famous living creature in America; in 1938 his name was mentioned more frequently in the newspapers than FDR's. Damned if this isn't about the corniest story in the world, but just try to resist Hillenbrand's tale of the triumph of sheer equine gumption over adversity and the hoity-toity East Coast racing establishment with its favorite thoroughbred, the exquisitely beautiful War Admiral. (War Admiral's contest with Seabiscuit is generally considered one of the greatest horse races of all time.) A dash of realism comes in the form of bleak tales of the grueling, risky lives of jockeys as well as their phenomenal athleticism. And then there are Hillenbrand's accounts of the races themselves, fleet, lean and thrilling. You can almost feel your toes in the stirrups as the unstoppable Seabiscuit makes his fierce bid for the finish line.
Strip City
By Lily Burana
330 pages
Talk/Miramax Books
With a premise that makes it sound like one of publishing's typical throwaway books about a sexy topic -- a former stripper about to be wed makes one final ecdysiastic road trip across America -- this memoir never stoops to clichés or easy choices. Burana keeps pushing herself to unearth the fundamental nature of her mercurial love-hate relationship with the work that helped her survive in her first years away from home, gave her a renegade subculture to satisfy her yen for rebellion and rattled her to the core by exposing her to the raw edge of human neediness. Like all rigorously honest works, "Strip City" is unlikely to suit anyone's political agenda, but it's so full of rowdy energy and unaffected soul-searching that only a hopeless ideologue could object to it. Furthermore, Burana can really write -- her descriptions of the truck stops, dives and swank joints she travels through have all the slangy eloquence required by great American road stories.And she's hilarious, a brainy, brassy dame with a penchant for heavy metal who sheds wisecracks left and right with an insouciance the rest of us can only envy.
Salon's original review | An interview with Lily Burana
Wittgenstein's Poker
By David Edmonds & John Eidinow
340 pages
HarperCollins
An account, as its subtitle explains, of a 10-minute argument between two great thinkers, this elegant little volume compresses a remarkable amount of history, psychology and philosophy into its 340 petite pages. The quarrel, between Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein, took place in a meeting room in Cambridge, England, in 1946, and Wittgenstein may or may not have shaken a fireplace poker at his adversary (eyewitnesses differ on this point). It's the personalities of the two men -- the preoccupied, quasi-aristocratic Wittgenstein and the scrappy, ambitious Popper; one worshipped by his followers, the other perceiving himself as snubbed -- that leave the most powerful impression. Edmonds and Eidinow show us how the two men rose out of the peculiar milieu of assimilated Jewry in pre-War Vienna, a world of dizzying brilliance and culture now irretreivably lost. As for the subject of their fight -- the question "Are there philosophical problems?" -- the authors use it to limn one of the fundamental philosophical divides of the day with crystal clarity. While those who find reading Wittgenstein's notoriously difficult "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" a snap may scorn this little exposition as unforgivably simplistic, for the rest of us it offers a delightful entrie into daunting territory, and perhaps an invitation to venture further in, as well.
