By Nick Owchar '90
Nick Owchar is Deputy Book Editor of the Los Angeles Times and serves on the CMC magazine Editorial Board.
A World War II veteran once sent me a memoir of his experiences as a wartime aviator, packaged by one of those self-publishing units that, for a fee, typesets your manuscript and makes it available online.
Would you please write a review of it? read the accompanying note, written with shaky hand and the tone of a sweet, old gentleman.
The first chapter presented itself as extremely personal, but not particularly well written. I noticed that great moments, like a time when mechanical failure threatened the pilot's safety, were covered in just a paragrapha missed opportunity to develop a long, pulse-pounding, riveting scene. Its weighted dialogue read like a court reporter's notes: too much "he said" and "they said." It bore the stamps of a rough oral history. On the other hand, I imagined this a potential treasure for his grandchildren, and all those subsequent relations who would want to know how the war had affected their family.
What could I do?
I returned the book with a letter that delicately outlined my thoughts. I tried not to tread too heavily on his dreams of being, say, the next Norman Maclean (A River Runs Through It), who found his enchanting storytelling voice in his twilit years, or the next Frank McCourt, whose Angela's Ashes was a lyrical story of Irish misery that sold millions.
I still wince thinking of that kindly fellow reading my rejection note. Even though many manuscripts shouldn't be published, they nonetheless are penned in earnest. In many cases, as was the aviator's, these authors are committing important acts of memory. It is difficult to explain to someone that his work is invaluable, even as you're declining to review it.
Most times, however, the business of selecting books for the Los Angeles Times Book Review is like a version of the "desert island" game. Have you ever played that? It goes something like this: Name the five record albums you couldn't live without on a desert island. Or, name the 10 books or two foods or the three people you'd take with you. You get the idea. It's an exercise that shows how truly difficultalmost painfulit can be to limit, select, and exclude much that is worthy.
Our offices receive a daily flood of new and forthcoming titles. And of the more than 150,000 books published every year (numbers vary based on whose stats you're using), our paper has room to publicize just 2 to 3 percent of them.
Within minutes of identifying myself as a newspaper book editor, I'm therefore continuously asked the same question: How do you pick what appears in the section?
There are a variety of ways to answer. Besides the standard strategies of looking at the big publishing houses and the literary world's marquee namesWhat is Simon & Schuster doing this fall? Does Salman Rushdie or Margaret Atwood have something in the works?there's an image that guides me: that of a reader at the kitchen table, steaming coffee at the ready, hoping to enjoy a few moments on a quiet Sunday before the children wake.
Various blog snobs may complain that this is hardly a scientific or sophisticated approach, but selecting books for review always involves an individual's tastes and subjectivity. And the audience I care about reaching has the widest, most varied tastes of all. I imagine that I'm serving all those folk who've grown up with books and have learned to dream from themall those people who seek momentary escape through written word, much the same way that television transports others. It is for these, to borrow from Dylan Thomas, that I labor by singing light.
This summer's offering of new books is challenging. Why? Because it is superb.
Often, publisher catalogues treat the summer season as beach reading timethree months when the intellect takes holiday and bookstores plant displays of outdoor grilling books, romance novels and titles devoted to improving one's golf swing. But not this time. The summer of 2006 kicks! There's a breadth and scope here that is exciting to consider. And although you may decide that July or August is better suited to re-reading War and Peace or digging up a classic that escaped your prior attention, consider these forthcoming titles as you govern your own fantasy desert island or, perhaps more realistically, command that inflatable backyard pool:
Comrade Rockstar: The Life and Mystery of Dean Reed, the All-American Boy Who Brought Rock 'n' Roll to the Soviet Union by Reggie Nadelson (Walker & Company)
Dean Reed sought fame and found it in the Eastern bloc during the 1970s and 1980s, though no one in the U.S. had any idea who he was. While Ronald Reagan spoke of the Soviet "evil empire," Reed sang about "Heartbreak Hotel" in Red Square, and attained Elvis-like status in the process.
Nadelson takes a journey East to learn about Reed's life and what happened to him, how he became a propaganda tool for Soviet leaders and the epitome of all things American for the Soviet Union's masses. When his body was found in a Russian lake in 1986, his death was ruled a suicide, but like all enigmatic figures in Russian history, his death took on an aura of mystery that Nadelson attempts to penetrate. Nadelson is transfixed by Reed's good looks, his boyish charm and the unforgettable image of this Colorado-born rockstar with Pat Boone-style hair "being mobbed by Soviet fans, people plucking at his clothes, throwing flowers, begging for autographs."
You'll be fascinated too.
Crouching Father, Hidden Toddler: A Zen Guide for New Dads by C.W. Nevius (Chronicle Books)
One of the best things about this book are sections with names like "The Unstoppable Chi of Drool" and "The Cosmic Diaper: A Meditation." These zen-like insights into handling a little child are meant to amuse new dads even as they deliver some stern lessons about what it means to be a father. If your baby has a cold, plan on staying in your underwear, unshaven, and dealing with crankiness and sniffling all day; don't whine that you can't hang out with your buddies. This is called "going with the flu flow." Like a wise, Zen monk, Nevius advises one to "live in the moment of creamed corn:" don't get upset when baby spits food all over you; curb your anger and chill out.
After a long work day, it is difficult for many dads to shift gears, but that's their problem: their children don't care about that. They haven't seen you for eight hours, they want to be with you. This book subtly jabs at those acts of selfishness that flare up in many of us. The early stages of fatherhood can be bewildering, the author writes, which is why he designed this book in terms of Zen meditations; because "the idea of wu wei, or not pushing and simply letting things happen, rings true."
Friendship: An Expose by Joseph Epstein (Houghton Mifflin)
"Friendship is the strongest of relationships not bound by or hostage to biology, which is to say, blood," Epstein writes with vigor and wit characteristic of his earlier book Snobbery: The American Version. Who is a friend? Who is merely an acquaintance? Why do we need friends?
To answer these and other questions, Epstein makes a delightful survey, including digressions into The Three Musketeers, the life of Cicero, NBC's Seinfeld, Paul Simon's music, and the after-dinner hour at his parents' home, where unexpected guests would arrive and surprise his father who was "already in his pajamas, out of which he'd quickly change back into his trousers and shirt."
Epstein is a nuanced and careful thinker, and his book takes in friendship's many aspects. But what I like most is the point that friends accept us with all our weaknesses and flaws in tow. He quotes from Shakespeare: "A friendly Eye is slow to see small Faults."
Helen of Troy: A Novel by Margaret George (Viking)
I thought that Bettany Hughes had the last word with her book and PBS documentary last year about the life of Helen, and even though my nerd heart fluttered at the sight of this comely British classicist strolling among Greek ruins, I had to give some small grudging appreciation to George. Her gigantic novels of the great ladies of antiquity (she's also the author of The Memoirs of Cleopatra and Mary, Called Magdalene) have kept these figures alive in the minds of the general public.
Narrated by Helen herself, the novel's a pulpier version of Homer's Iliad with plenty of bedroom scenes thrown in. Paris is the Trojan golden boy who makes Helen feel sweet pangs, but that's not entirely why she leaves the stubborn Greek warrior Menelaus. The real reason? The whims of the gods: "[T]he moon, that cold goddess, looked down on our silver bed through the window and her chill air banished loved."
George's novels are vast, sprawling, a bit overheated, but often entertaining.
The Librettist of Venice: The Remarkable Life of Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart's Poet, Casanova's Friend, and Italian Opera's Impresario in America by Rodney Bolt (Bloomsbury)
Working with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart on operas such as The Marriage of Figaro seems like a sufficient claim to fame, doesn't it? Lorenzo Da Ponte's life had many high points, professionally, as well as in his friendships and encounters with Casanova, Mozart's rival Salieri, and Emperor Joseph II. Often a life story takes on a single shape: a rise to fame followed by decline or stability. But Da Ponte's life was filled with many ups and downs, and he lived through tumultuous times that included the French Revolution, Napoleon's rise and fall, and his own near-ruin after investing his money in a number of harebrained schemes.
The metaphor of the phoenix recurs in Bolt's engaging narrative and it's extremely apt. In 1805 Da Ponte left Europe to try his fortunes in America and wound up working as a grocer and bookstore owner. Then he rose from the ashes again, helping to found New York City's first opera house and becoming a professor of music. The Librettist of Venice challenges the notion that one can only have a moment or two of triumph in lifefor Da Ponte lived to have many.
Malory: The Knight Who Became King Arthur's Chronicler by Christina Hardyment (HarperCollins)
Considering that it was Thomas Malory who gave the English-speaking world "Le Morte Darthur," little is known about him in much the same way that conjectures and speculations fill biographies of Shakespeare. Historians have found his name in documents listing him among criminals guilty of attempted murder, theft, and rape. Biographer Hardyment is astounded by this: "How could a man who composed one of the most warmly human and nobly intended books of all time break every law in the book of chivalry?"
Hardyment focuses on the politics of the time, giving a plausible explanation that the charges against Malory were motivated by political treachery; many a good person was targeted for ruin in that age. Her reading of the Arthurian epic is fascinating as she searches for small bits of private, biographical information that Malory inserted into the story as he compiled the legendsmentions of small villages he knew, for example, and events taking place in his time. Hardyment's handling of the period is deftly and colorfully achieved, bringing a distant figure into sharp relief, but not at the expense of the broader picture.
The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes edited by John Gross (Oxford University Press)
Often summer inclines us to take a ramble, through a garden, along the beach or in the pages of such a book as thisa rich compilation of often amusing incidents and quotes concerning past literary figures you may have studied in school as well as some who still walk among us.
When a reporter misunderstood Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's remarks about the afterlife (he had a fervent interest in spiritualism), a newspaper headline the next day declared "Doyle says they play golf in Heaven." Bob Dylan is caught, at a post-concert dinner in the 1980s, getting scolded by his mother ("You're not eating, BobbyYou're skin and bones." "I'm eating, Ma, I'm eating"). The entries are mostly about male writers, which is disappointing: Either the editor's vision is too testosterone-influenced, or female writers are just better at not getting caught in some event that will become an anecdote!
At any rate, the book's final two glimpses of writers are Jeanette Winterson and J.K. Rowling. Winterson's is the more touching and powerfulRowling's just concerns the hype around the Harry Potter seriesas she describes developing as a writer and reader in a house where strict religious parents forbade most books. Winterson recalls sneaking books into the bathroom ("It was on the toilet that I first read Freud and D.H. Lawrence") and concealing books in her bed: [A]nyone with a single bed will discover that seventy-seven can be accommodated per layer under the mattress."
It's heartbreaking to learn what happened when her mother noticed the bed rising each day as Winterson added new books: "She burned everything."
Orson Welles: Hello Americans (Vol. 2) by Simon Callow (Viking)
Welles was blessed by the gods of theatre: voice, bearing, and acute dramatic sense, all by his early 20s. He was the genius who could make an alien invasion believable, or create one of the 20th century's pivotal films. So what happened to him?
Simon Callow's first volume of the biography, The Road to Xanadu, took us from Welles' childhood to the creation of Citizen Kane. Now, with Hello Americans, he follows Welles in the decade after the film, the crucial period when his artistic gifts were never fully realized.
Callow partly looks at the fact that brilliant minds are often misunderstood by the bean-counters, and many times Welles had projectsfilms such as The Magnificent Ambersons and Macbeth yanked from his control by impatient movie executives. Still, his own concentration was diluted by taking on too many projects and making too many grandiose plans. Although painful to observe, Callow's telling makes one eager for his next installment, as Welles' star continues its descent.
Seminary Boy: A Memoir by John Cornwell (Doubleday)
Cornwell caused quite a stir in the Catholic world several years ago with Hitler's Pope, a book portraying Pius XII as a pawn of the Fuehrer, and as deaf to the cries coming out of Europe's concentration camps during World War II. With Seminary Boy he reflects on his childhood and upbringing and the years he spent at Cotton College, a seminary in the English countryside, before abandoning his plan to become a priest.
Cornwell's prose is lively, colorful, evocative (one of the reasons, no doubt, why Hitler's Pope troubled so many people was his skill at bringing forgotten history to life) as he describes his struggle between love for glorious Catholic rituals and traditions and the joys of just being young, in love and rebellious.
Vietnam: A Natural History by Eleanor Jane Sterling, Martha Maud Hurley and Le Duc Minh (Yale University Press)
The Vietnam War helped to create a single dominant image of that country's jungles as nothing more than a tangle concealing mines, enemy troops and deadly snakes. But the authors, all connected with the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation at the American Museum of Natural History, travel there to show readers the wonder of the region with its more than 850 species of birds, 27 ape and monkey species, plus the likes of flying lemurs, pheasants and storks and a spectacular assortment of plants and flowers ("Vietnam is home to a great richness of orchids, many of them unique to the country").
Much of the flora and fauna described here, however, is located in "politically sensitive zones where access is restricted and the threat of unexploded ordnance remains."
Unless political circumstances change, this book may be your only way of getting a good look at this astounding area of the world.
Nick Owchar '90