'True Compass' by Edward M. Kennedy

Review By Tim Rutten
Chicago Tribune

"The graveyards of the world," Charles De Gaulle once said, "are filled with indispensable men."

The eloquent shrug of Gallic irony aside, the living do walk away, even from the graves of the great and good, and history -- which is life in the aggregate -- simply goes on. Yet it does no justice to the living or the dead to pretend that some losses do not diminish us in ways that impoverish our collective experience and strip away a bit of life's savor.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy's recent death was such a loss, and "True Compass," his touchingly candid, big-hearted and altogether superb memoir, demonstrates precisely why. Completed in the shadow of the senator's own mortality, this is a book whose clarity of recollection and expression entitles it to share in the lineage established by America's first great memoir of public life -- "The Autobiography of U.S. Grant," which he wrote while himself dying of cancer.

There are, of course, fundamental differences: The former president and Union commander was a 19th century man setting down a public life; Kennedy is very much a man of our time, open to exploring the interplay of his inner and outer lives. Grant wrote his autobiography; although Kennedy was a devoted diarist whose natural gifts as a storyteller and as a sharp, painterly observer shine through every page, he was ably assisted not only by the writer -- and Twain biographer -- Ron Powers, but also by his wife, Vicki Reggie, and a variety of scholars, particularly those associated with the University of Virginia's oral history project.

All the Kennedy brothers were known for their superb staffs -- Teddy, most of all.

In the weeks leading up to Monday's publication of "True Compass," much of the obvious "news" in this book was leaked to the press, particularly his bitter regrets over his "inexcusable" behavior during the Chappaquiddick tragedy, the night of heavy drinking that resulted in rape allegations against one of his nephews, and the failure of his first marriage. What's far more remarkable about this memoir is its capacious and generous spirit.

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'Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music'

Greg Kot, Tribune music critic, reports reasons behind industry's downfall

By David E. Thigpen
Chicago Tribune

In 2000, U.S. record sales peaked at 785 million albums. It was the beginning of the end for the record industry as the world knew it. During the next eight years, album sales fell 45 percent and the pain spread throughout the business. After decades of fat profits and limousine lifestyles, the Big Four record companies -- Sony, Universal, Warner, EMI -- and a tight coterie of radio conglomerates and promoters suddenly found themselves fighting for their lives. In response, they did what any industry in crisis does: laid off thousands of workers. But in this case traditional thinking was precisely the problem. According to Tribune music critic Greg Kot in his expertly reported "Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music," the economic apocalypse that fell upon the record establishment couldn't have happened to a more deserving bunch.

The trigger for the industry's crisis was the rapid rise of digital copying and the sharing of music enabled by the Internet. But as Kot lets the story flow through interviews with musicians, executives and many earnest, well-informed fans, the digital revolution merely peeled back a curtain revealing the rot underlying the industry's traditional business structures. From the unhealthy consolidation of radio to absurdly high-priced CDs to usurious deals with artists to payola and the triumph of lowest-common denominator taste over quality, Kot recounts how the industry foolishly dug in and refused change even as the landscape of record-selling shifted out from beneath its feet.

Confronted with the fact that fans preferred digital music, a business model amply proven by the explosive growth of the pirate file-sharing service Napster, record bosses sued rather than join the future. "The industry responded not with vigorous new ideas, but with strong-arm tactics and threats," Kot writes. "It served fans not with digital innovation but with lawsuits. ..." Of course, digital was and is the future.

The slow reaction of the record companies to digital music left an opening that would bring billions to Steve Jobs through Apple's iTunes and iPods. But more important to Kot's story, a new "wired" generation of Internet-savvy and striving young artists, fanzine editors and scrappy start-up labels walked through the door too. Their work -- haphazard, halting, often unsuccessful but always inspired -- adds up to a movement that is rejuvenating pop and hip-hop -- including talents such as Wilco, Bright Eyes and Arcade Fire.

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'How to Hold a Woman' by Billy Lombardo

Reviewed By Lynna Williams
Chicago Tribune

'How to Hold a Woman' by Billy Lombardo

Death of a daughter, sister ripples throughout her family for years to come.

Missing and then murdered children are so much a part of the American landscape that a novelist who deals with the subject must find new ways into the material. Chicago writer Billy Lombardo has done that in "How to Hold a Woman" by fragmenting the novel into stories, separate moments in the lives of the family a dead 12-year-old girl leaves behind.

The result is a moving kaleidoscope of sorrow, as the impact of the tragedy continues to wreak profound change on a middle-class family of six, bewilderingly changed to five on an August evening in Chicago that begins with a joyful homecoming. Dad Alan Taylor is coming home from two months on a research trip in Madagascar and his family -- wife Audrey, daughter Isabelle and son Sammy -- pick him up at the airport. Son Dex is spending the night at a friend's house, and the family decamps to a restaurant where Isabelle flirts with her father, acting out bits of Daisy Buchanan's dialogue from "The Great Gatsby." She has changed in those two months, Alan sees, become someone a little more grown up, less a little girl.

We see the family happy together for part of that night. Then, as quickly as the unthinkable becomes real, Isabelle drops out of the picture. When we come upon the family again, two years later, she's been sliced out of the family dialogue. No one refers to her by name or tells her story directly. We hear about no vigils, no years in therapy, no efforts to keep her memory alive. Alan and Audrey are a couple with an increasingly troubled marriage who, when asked, answer correctly that they have two children. We see the impact of the loss of Isabelle in everything they do, though, from Audrey's raging silences to the parents' separation to Alan's change of careers to Audrey's standing at a window at a dance studio, her nose pressed against the glass as young girls practice inside. The couple are loving parents to their sons, but the boys are left to think through Isabelle's disappearance and death themselves. Sammy is too young to really remember her last night, but Dex, who wasn't there, lives with regret that he wasn't present, sure that he would remember each moment with Isabelle in ways Sammy cannot.


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'The Signal' By Ron Carlson

Reviewed By J.K.
Chicago Tribune

Mack's father has been gone from this Earth a good long time, but he's still a daily part of Mack's life. That gives "The Signal" (Viking), the new novel by Ron Carlson, special resonance on a Sunday devoted to dads.

They ran a guest ranch in Wyoming, did father and son, until the father passed away unexpectedly, at which point Mack's life fell apart: "At the ranch, everything was tilted, weird; it was more than something missing. Gravity had changed. Mack saw to the horses and painted the small barn, but there was no center for him without his father there."

Yet as Mack divulges in the course of this uncommonly fine novel, his father lives vividly in his memories. Mack undertakes a mysterious trip in the wilderness, taking along his estranged wife, Vonnie, and his father's words and rules are often all that stand between Mack and disaster.

Carlson's writing is crisp and blunt, much like the very Wyoming landscape he describes. In his last novel, "Five Skies" (2007), he did the same thing: He echoed the raw topography with the simple beauty of his words. "I pay attention to every sentence," Carlson said in a recent phone interview.

"I work very hard in my book to make them about real places," he added. "In a lot of books today, we have a lot of general, floating life, life in apartments, urban stories. I'm much more interested in the West. I work from particulars."

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"The Frozen Thames" by Helen Humphreys

"The Frozen Thames" by Helen Humphreys

Reviewed By Alan Cheuse
Chicago Tribune

Canadian writer Helen Humphreys deals in her lovely prose experiment, "The Frozen Thames," with a kind of creation—the way that water turns to ice in winter—in 40 winters to be exact, 40 winters over the course of seven centuries.

Over and over again the Thames freezes. Birds freeze and fall from the air. Londoners face the cold and danger and pleasure of river ice. Boatmen lament the loss of free-flowing water; the poor sometimes freeze in mid-crossing; lovers embrace there; plague victims suffer there; royalty celebrates this mystery of physics and chemistry.

As Humphreys has a lady-in-waiting to the 32-year-old Queen Elizabeth I soliloquize in the mid-1600s, "The ice is new to us. The old ways of behaving don't seem to apply here. ... It is as though, in the very fact that the river froze, anything else might suddenly become possible as well."

Reading this inventive little volume, with a bit of a shiver, you know what it must have been like for Adam and Eve to see ice for the first time.

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"Infinity in the Palm of Her Hand: A Novel of Adam and Eve" by Giaconda Belli

"Infinity in the Palm of Her Hand: A Novel of Adam and Eve" by Giaconda Belli

Reviewed By Susan Salter Reynolds
Chicago Tribune

The creation story is the best improv exercise ever invented. Creation and destruction, self and no-self, story and history, fiction and nonfiction chase themselves in endless circles. The creation story is the Mobius strip, the double helix, the pattern language of art.

For an artist to take it on, she must feel that she is really ready to take it on. It is an act of calligraphy—too much ego, and the mirror that is the story cracks, the pool ripples. Narcissus remains deluded. Told with pure intent, imagination and clarity, the story is generous, capacious. The story becomes The Story.

So you will be glad to hear that Gioconda Belli, who is not a restrained sort of writer, keeps her creation story simple. First, she peels off the old layers of morality—her creation story is hardly a cautionary tale. Second, good and evil, if they exist at all, are two sides of the same state of being. The lovers, who try to figure out who this "Other" is and why he punished them so harshly, even wonder whether the serpent is God's Eve, if the serpent was taken from the Other, just as Eve was from Adam.

This is important, for if there is a new, evolved religion, surely it must embrace the possibility that we are pure at heart, that we do the best we can. To Belli's Adam and Eve, things that are good feel good; things that are bad feel bad. Belli's Eve sincerely believes that God wouldn't have put the tree or the fruit or the knowledge of good and evil in their path unless he had wanted them to partake.

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Alan Moore, author of "Watchmen," reinvented the comic book

By Christopher Borrelli and Robert K. Elder
Chicago Tribune

Over the past 30 years, author Alan Moore has almost single-handedly reinvented the comic book, transforming its language, broadening its scope and deepening its intellect. So, naturally, Hollywood has been poaching his stories for years, the most egregious being the 2003 loud and dumb adaptation of his otherwise highly literate "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen."

There also have been films based on his works, such as "Constantine," "From Hell" and a glossy but tonally faithful version of "V for Vendetta"; both last year's "The Dark Knight" and Tim Burton's original " Batman" owe a debt to Moore's "Batman: The Killing Joke."

This weekend, however, we get director Zack Snyder's sprawling adaptation of " Watchmen," Moore's most celebrated creation. Initially a 12-issue series with artist Dave Gibbons, the collected volume has become one of the most acclaimed graphic novels ever, hailed by Time magazine as one of the best 100 novels of the 20th Century. It's about aging superheroes, nuclear politics and social engineering.

That said, Moore has sworn off movie profits inspired by his books; he recently told the Los Angeles Times that he is opposed to movies based on his work. About "Watchmen" he said, "I will be spitting venom all over it for months to come." As with most of his comics, Moore has insisted "Watchmen" is "inherently unfilmable," heresy in this time of inevitable big-screen adaptation.

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'Cutting for Stone' by Abraham Verghese

'Cutting for Stone' by Abraham Verghese

Reviewed By Art Winslow
Chicago Tribune

The classical Hippocratic oath includes the avowal that "I will not use the knife, not even on sufferers from stone, but will withdraw in favor of such men as are engaged in this work." This, assumedly, is the allusion the physician and writer Abraham Verghese had in mind when titling his first novel "Cutting for Stone." Four of his principal characters—a father who abandoned his twin sons, the twins themselves and the man who became their surrogate father—make the life choice to become surgeons.

There are questions of bravery and ethics, and betrayal and forgiveness as well, bound up in this enterprise, which as Verghese twists the tale is partly one of Indian and Ethiopian diaspora. His narrator, a trauma surgeon named Marion Stone, was born a premature twin weighing 3 pounds and had to be cut from his conjoined brother, Shiva, at their birth in a hospital in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Marion, now 50, is eager to relate his brother's story—he used to consider them a single being, ShivaMarion—which requires that he relate his own story, and that of their parents as well. Marion's life brought him from Africa to exile in America, and then back to Africa, a path which leaves him claiming he is "proof that geography is destiny," although much of "Cutting for Stone" can be read as illustrating the opposite.

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"The Vagrants" by Yiyun Li

"The Vagrants"
By Yiyun Li

Reviewed By Conan Putnam
Chicago Tribune

"The Vagrants," Yiyun Li's extraordinary debut novel, is set in China in spring 1979, two years after the death of Chairman Mao and the arrest of his wife, Madame Mao, and her gang in the central government. The Cultural Revolution has been declared a failure and the party has launched "a new Communist era full of love and progress" to lift up the masses. In the countryside, after years of the people's commune, peasants are being allowed to own their land. In the newly industrialized town of Muddy River, where 80,000 people live in blocks of shabby, one-story houses, young people are returning from rural re-education camps to work in factories and the shops along main street.

Among those returning is Gu Shan, 28, a former Red Guard, who, after serving a 10-year prison sentence for denouncing Chairman Mao, is about to be executed as an unrepentant counterrevolutionary. The novel opens on the morning of her execution, which is also the first day of spring. Gu Shan's mother is gathering a bag of clothes to burn at the crossroads in a Chinese burial ritual to ensure that her child will be kept warm on the journey to the next world. Her father, Teacher Gu, who is having troubles of his own finding someone to bury their daughter's body after she is executed, cautions his wife against a public display of grief: "It's superstitious, reactionary—it's all wrong."

To read more of Conan Putnam's review, please click here.

'The Red Convertible: Selected and New Stories' by Louise Erdrich

By Beth Kephart
January 17, 2009
Found at the Chicago Tribune

It was Louise Erdrich's fault that I fell back in love with fiction. I speak of years ago and the opening pages of "The Beet Queen." I speak of "Love Medicine" and "Tracks." I could not get enough of the odd modifiers, the unglossed people, the immaculate tattling on about butchers and knives peddlers, weigh-shack employees and sink holes, Jell-O salads prettied up with sliced radishes, 24 fried fantail shrimp on a bed of coleslaw. It was all so quirky, also authentic. It was so tumbled down and awkwardly fine, and it didn't matter who was talking—male or female, child or adult, love bruised or love infatuated. Erdrich got it right. Laughing, I read her. Amazed, I couldn't set her down.

"The Red Convertible: Selected and New Stories" is Erdrich's compendium of greatest hits—30 familiar stories (many of which formed the backbones of her multi-narrator novels) and six not previously published ones. The short story, Erdrich tells us in her too-brief preface, is where her novels often begin, where ideas "gather force and weight and complexity." So Mary and Karl, the abandoned children of "The Blue Velvet Box," could not be left alone once they stowed away on a freight train in the spring of 1932. Karl would go west, and Mary east. Mary would stay right where she landed, in that place called Argus, in that life of sausage stuffing and butchering. Karl would return, years later, "fine boned, slick, agreeable, and dressed to kill in his sharp black suit, winy vest, knotted brown tie." They'd keep showing up in short stories—changed, familiar, irresistible—until a novel had been webbed together of the most immaculate parts.

Erdrich's stories don't grow old. They grow more astonishing for how fresh they still feel, packaged this way, wide, wrinkly, back-to-back. You only have to read the first story, which is also the title story, to get a whiff of authorial wizardry—to understand that Erdrich is, in the space of 10 pages, going to give you not just a whole family and the way they talk, but the way they hurt and the way they almost heal one another. She's going to give you one line, "My boots are filling," that is going to go and break your heart. She warns you. You follow. You fall.

To read the entire review by Beth Kephart, please click here.