'The Show That Smells' by Derek McCormack

Reviewed By Jim Ruland
LA Times

Even by the standards of the paranormal romances that occupy the top slots of bestseller lists, Derek McCormack's new novel of cursed crooners, murderous fashion designers and homosexual vampires is an exercise in campy excess.

Taking its name from carny speak for a performance that features animal acts, "The Show That Smells" spins off the actual premise of country music pioneer Jimmie Rodgers dying young as a result of tuberculosis. Jimmie's wife, Carrie, makes a deal with the devil to save her husband's life, only in McCormack's milieu the devil is the inimitable Parisian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli -- who happens to be a vampire who can be stopped only with liberal doses of Chanel No. 5. "The Show That Smells" is redolent with such high jinks.

The story is presented as a live-action film shot entirely in a mirror maze. The characters are both the actors and the roles they play. For instance, Schiaparelli's minion is simultaneously "Dracula's" Renfield and Lon Chaney in stage makeup. Because the action is located on a set that replicates everything ad infinitum, it's never clear what's "real" and what's simply in the script.


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'This Wicked World' by Richard Lange

Reviewed By Antoine Wilson
LA Times

In the hard-boiled universe of Richard Lange's debut novel, "This Wicked World," trying to do the right thing can lead only to trouble. Ex-Marine and former bodyguard Jimmy Boone knows this all too well. Fresh out of Corcoran and on parole, he's biding his time, tending bar for tourists on Hollywood Boulevard and managing a group of rental bungalows.

Yet when Robo, the bar's bouncer, asks for help on a "hero for hire" gig, Boone hears him out. The job sounds simple enough: Robo needs Boone to accompany him to a meet at a Denny's restaurant. All Boone has to do is wear a sports jacket and look like a cop. As Robo puts it, "my regular white boy is fishing in Cabo."

At Denny's, an elderly Guatemalan man enlists Robo to investigate the death of his grandson, Oscar Rosales, a young migrant worker found dead on an MTA bus and covered with infected dog bites. This puts Boone and Robo on a trail that leads eventually to a sketchy apartment near MacArthur Park, where Oscar had been living. There they find a group of Oscar's friends, a toothless pit bull and a story. Oscar was mauled by dogs while working for someone out in the desert. He made his way back to L.A. but didn't see a doctor because he was afraid the people from the desert were coming after him. Beyond that, the friends don't know anything.

As far as Robo is concerned, it's enough. He's done. Boone, on the other hand, can't let it go. He buys the toothless pit bull from the roommates, and something clicks in him: "It's time to stop kidding himself. The mystery of Oscar's death has been haunting him for days, and the only way he's going to get any peace is by looking into it further. . . . This is what he's been waiting for when he wakes in the night, his body tense, his mind racing: a mission. A rocky path to some untamed form of redemption." Thus begins his descent into a brutal world of dog fighting, drugs and counterfeit money.

The stories in Lange's first book, the critically acclaimed "Dead Boys," gripped the reader from the first lines: a dozen first-person narrators, utterly convincing in detail and voice. These stories of down-on-their-luck men trying to rise above the past flirted with genre but were first published in literary magazines. "This Wicked World," however, is more straightforwardly genre-oriented, as if Lange has made the conscious choice to structure his long-form narrative around established conventions of mystery and neo-noir. Written in third person, moving in and out of various characters' points of view, the novel reveals more of its artifice than the stories did, and as such it feels more like a well-assembled work of entertainment than a gritty dispatch from the front lines.

Parallel chapters follow the machinations of two thugs, their crime boss and the boss' girlfriend as they enforce the repayment of debts, dispose of a body and set up a dog-fighting event. Lange's villains are a rogues' gallery of greed, aspiration, gluttony and stupidity, drawn with a keen eye for their small-time aspirations. One thug needs money for tattoo removal, to look respectable for an upcoming custody battle. Another dreams of producing a line of martial-arts-cum-exercise videos called "Killer Instincts: Way of the Ghetto Warrior."

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'The Favorites' by Mary Yukari Waters

Reviewed By Janice P. Nimura

LA Times

True fluency in two cultures is a privilege -- and a burden -- granted to few. Mary Yukari Waters is one of these. Her Irish American father met and married her mother in Kyoto, Japan, where Waters spent her early years. At age 9, she moved with her parents to California, where she still lives, while remaining close to her Kyoto relatives. Strikingly Caucasian-looking to the Japanese, more Japanese at heart than Americans suspect, Waters is unusually able to explain them to each other.

Six years ago, Waters published "The Laws of Evening," a collection of quiet, precise stories that brought the submerged trauma of postwar Japan to agonized life. Each story was an intimate ink drawing, expressing volumes of pain and stubborn hope with a few eloquent strokes. They were exquisite, and complete in themselves, but to Waters, it seems, they were just a sketchbook.

"The Favorites," her first novel, borrows liberally from many of the stories, repeating images and characters in a larger format, one perhaps not as well-suited to her minimal style.

The novel's first half is an expanded revision of Waters' semiautobiographical story "The Way Love Works." In the summer of 1978, 14-year-old Sarah Rexford and her mother, Yoko, arrive in Kyoto from California for an extended visit with Sarah's sprightly grandmother, Mrs. Kobayashi.

After five years of expatriate unease, Yoko has returned to her natural element, and Sarah watches in wonder as her mother reclaims her place as charismatic "queen bee" of the neighborhood and apple of her mother's eye. Sarah, used to rolling her adolescent eyes at Yoko's cultural gaffes at home, is startled at the pleasure she now takes in her mother's reflected glory.

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'The Wikipedia Revolution,' 'Stealing MySpace' and 'Viral Spiral'

By Lizzie Skurnick
LA Times

When the history of the Web is written, in what form will our progeny receive it? Via grainy promotional YouTube videos from Google? By listening to dusty Jeff Jarvis podcasts? Perhaps annotated, crowd-sourced and pre-preferenced Wikistories will be delivered directly into their cerebrums. (Personally, I'm hoping for a tiny avatar of a young woman in a flowing white gown and side-buns, interrupted midway by gunfire.) Yet whatever the medium, it seems unlikely that it will be the one that's falling out of favor even as you read this: the plain old book.

Because -- why write a book about a website? Really. Why do it? It distances the reader from the medium in an awkward and inexplicable way. (Not quite dancing the book review, but close.) It abdicates temporal authority, since by the time of publication, most visitors will have moved on to faster-caching pastures. Any user wishing to know about any site is presumably equipped with the power to log on and experience it herself, while those of us curled up with Edith Wharton and a nice tumbler of single malt are unlikely to look at breathless dispatches on how the other half keystrokes. And, although the Web lives to be writ and overwrit, most print authors, naturally enough, resist the idea of instantly being made palimpsest. So what are they doing with their peskily immutable pages in this land of instant updates?

In the case of "The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia," Andrew Lih's motivation, I think, is simply to spread the good word. This is less a thoughtful analysis than a movement handbook for would-be adherents, like "Black Power," say, or "The Moosewood Cookbook."

Hooray for them

"Imagine a world in which every person is given free access to the sum of human knowledge. That's what we're doing," begins the foreword by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. Wikipedia, adds the collective that wrote the first chapter by wiki, laying out their philosophy of collaborative knowledge, "is something by design that is pure, empowering and untainted by commerce." (Writing well, like achieving a perfect tremolo or getting a good scald on fried chicken, is one of those arts that stubbornly resists crowdsourcing.) That storied Wikipedian neutrality? Net only.

Like all movement manifestoes, "The Wikipedia Revolution" marshals an impressive amount of insta-hagiography. It starts with reeducation ("To understand Wikipedia's community, one must understand the robust online culture that directly preceded it . . .") before shifting into the story of Wales himself. "Doris, ever the educator, was optimistic too," Lih writes about the mother of the future Wikipedia founder, "buying a set of the World Book Encyclopedia from a door-to-door salesman not long after becoming a mother. Jimmy, the firstborn, was not even three years old at the time. She didn't know it then, but she was planting a seed that would inspire a phenomenon."

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'Secret Son: A Novel' by Laila Lalami

'Secret Son: A Novel' by Laila Lalami

Reviewed By Bernadette Murphy
LA Times

Laila Lalami's new novel, "Secret Son," brings readers into the down-and-out sections of Casablanca, Morocco, to follow the travails of Youssef El Mekki, a young man trying to rise above the abject poverty into which he was born. Youssef knows certain things about himself: He knows his father, whom he doesn't remember, was a respected fourth-grade teacher who died while hanging lights for a religious feast, falling three floors and breaking his neck. He knows his mother is an orphan and thus the two of them must make their hardscrabble way together with no extended family to help.

He knows he is poor with few opportunities, but he's working hard to make the best of whatever chances he has by studying hard. Though not religious, he knows that the government is never going to help him and his fellow slum-dwellers in Hay An Najat, the poverty-steeped neighborhood where he resides in a shack of a home, but that Al Hizb ("The Party" that rallies for Muslim fundamentalism) is there with food and tents after devastating floods, promising "Power to the people through God, with God, and by God."

All the truths of Youssef's life will be challenged as the narrative winds its way, delivering both blows and windfalls from mektub (fate), that element that can't help but "split someone's life in a Before and After." The biggest revelation is that Youssef's father is not dead, but is actually Nabil Amrani, a respected, powerful and wealthy man. Youssef wonders what his life would be like if his father were to claim him, the secret product of an encounter with a household servant. "His existence until that moment had been nothing more than a role. . . . If he could be Youssef Amrani, he would not have to play any part at all. He could be, at long last, himself."

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'Not Becoming My Mother' by Ruth Reichl

'Not Becoming My Mother' by Ruth Reichl

Reviewed By Jonathan Kirsch
LA Times

Ruth Reichl is a commanding and daunting figure in American culture. Beginning in the 1970s, she played a key role in revolutionizing food and restaurant journalism, wielded make-or-break influence as a restaurant critic for the Los Angeles Times and later the New York Times, and continues to loom large as editor in chief of Gourmet magazine.

With her fourth book, "Not Becoming My Mother: And Other Things She Taught Me Along the Way," however, Reichl looks backward and inward in an attempt to understand and explain her mother, both to herself and to us.

At barely 100 pages, "Not Becoming My Mother" is a meditation rather than a memoir but is no less affecting for its brevity. Reichl is performing in public what is, after all, a rite of passage: the contemplation of a deceased parent. In that sense, her little book is an exploration of one of life's biggest mysteries.

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'Conversations With Frank Gehry' by Barbara Isenberg

'Conversations With Frank Gehry' by Barbara Isenberg

Reviewed By Christopher Hawthorne
LA Times

My hopes, I'll admit, were not especially high for "Conversations With Frank Gehry," Barbara Isenberg's collection of recent interviews with the architect. Particularly in public, Gehry can be reticent, even uncomfortable, when discussing the ideas behind his buildings. Though there are certainly architects -- Rem Koolhaas, Robert Venturi, Elizabeth Diller and Peter Eisenman among them -- who use the process of talking and writing as a kind of design software, shaping concepts that show up later in their work, Gehry is not one of them.

But a couple of things make "Conversations With Frank Gehry" surprisingly rich and even, at times, revelatory. One is that Gehry, who turned 80 earlier this year, is growing more reflective, even wistful, about his past. (My sense is that this wistfulness is neither involuntary nor perfectly organic: Gehry has always been an artful packager of his legend.) The second is that Gehry's long relationship with Isenberg, a journalist who has worked for The Times and the Wall Street Journal and who has been interviewing Gehry since the 1980s, has produced a level of trust and familiarity that allows him to open up in ways he has rarely done publicly.

In certain respects the book, which was born when Gehry asked Isenberg to work with him on an oral history, operates as a lo-fi, casual biography of the architect. It includes extensive material on the architect's childhood in Toronto; his move to Los Angeles as a teenager; his studies at USC and Harvard; the decision, in 1954, to change his last name from Goldberg to Gehry; his time in the U.S. Army; and the architects whose work he has studied most closely, including Alvar Aalto and the French Modernist Le Corbusier ("number one on my hit parade").


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"She Always Knew How" by Charlotte Chandler

"She Always Knew How" by Charlotte Chandler

Reviewed By Kevin Thomas
LA Times

Charlotte Chandler's gift at getting legendary show business figures to open up about themselves is unique. For "She Always Knew How," Chandler not only got the last major interview with Mae West -- not long before her death in 1980 at 87 -- but also what is almost certainly the most extensive interview West ever gave.

It's not that "She Always Knew How" is full of surprises, but that its depth and breadth brings West to life as thoughtful, caring and reflective, a woman of resilient character, self-knowledge and shrewdness in regard to human nature and in sustaining a career over eight decades.

As is well known, West had an extraordinarily close and loving relationship with her Bavarian-born mother Matilda, whose parents forbade her to go on the stage. As a result, she encouraged her daughter. Here, West talks at length about her mother's unstinting confidence in her; Matilda saw her daughter triumph on Broadway with the iconic "Diamond Lil" in 1928, but she died before West went on to conquer Hollywood.

West is candid about how her mother's focus on her exacted a price on both her younger sister, Beverly, who also had theatrical dreams, and, to a lesser extent, on her younger brother, John. Born in 1893, West began performing in lodge halls in her native Brooklyn at the age of 5 and in time became the key support for her entire family, which she remained for the rest of her life.

She made no bones about being less close to her father John West, who acquired some renown as the prizefighter Battlin' Jack. Yet in talking to Chandler, West discovers that she had more feelings for him than she realized, crediting him for being a loving and attentive father. Surely, it's significant that West was always attracted to rugged men like her father -- especially boxers and wrestlers. She emphasizes the comfort in which she and her siblings were raised; apparently, Matilda got some financial assistance from relatives because John West was no great shakes as a breadwinner.

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'The Glister' by John Burnside

'The Glister' by John Burnside

Reviewed By Michael Harris
LA Times

A moral fable in the guise of a murder mystery, John Burnside's "The Glister" has an unusual protagonist: its own prose style. Burnside, a Scot, has published 11 collections of poetry as well as a memoir, "A Lie About My Father," and fiction, including the novel "The Devil's Footprints." Here, the language in which it's told is crucial to how we read this darkly beautiful meditation on death, guilt and redemption.

Not that there isn't a hero of the regular, human sort: Leonard Wilson, a precociously bookish 15-year-old boy in a derelict Scottish industrial town. At intervals of a year or two, five of Leonard's schoolmates, all boys, have vanished. The authorities debunk widespread fears of foul play by claiming the boys have run off to the big city. Leonard knows better: "People from the Innertown don't leave, not even to go on holiday or visit relatives. They talk about leaving all the time, of course, but they never actually get out."

Why? In part, because the huge chemical plant that once gave work to the town's residents poisoned everything before it was closed down: soil, vegetation, animals, people. The older generation has died off or, like Leonard's father, languishes on the dole, prey to exotic illnesses. But the malaise is more than physical. It's a sin: "the sin of omission, the sin of averting our gaze and not seeing what was going on in front of our eyes. The sin of not wanting to know; the sin of knowing everything and not doing anything about it. The sin of knowing things on paper but not knowing them in our hearts. Everybody knows that sin."

The local constable, John Morrison, finds the first missing boy one night, ritualistically slain, hanging from a tree, but rather than publicize the crime or investigate it himself he phones Brian Smith, the home-grown magnate to whom he owes his job. Smith orders a coverup. Morrison, an insecure man with an alcoholic wife, obeys, at soul-destroying cost. As the years pass, and more boys disappear, he loses all self-respect. His only rebellious gesture, a secret one, is to tend a little garden in the woods as a shrine to the boys.

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'Columbine,' by Dave Cullen

Reviewed By David L. Ulin
LA Times

Forget everything you thought you knew. The girl who professed her faith in God before being gunned down in the library. The Trenchcoat Mafia and the feud between the goths and jocks. The idea that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold -- the two Columbine High School seniors who, on April 20, 1999, killed 12 of their fellow students and one teacher in what was, at the time, the worst school shooting in the history of the United States -- were disaffected, unpopular, motivated by resentment or revenge. Even the fact that the killings took place on Adolf Hitler's birthday was a coincidence: The boys had planned to do it a day earlier but hadn't been able to get the ammunition in time.

All of this, Dave Cullen notes in "Columbine," his comprehensive account of the tragedy and its aftermath, is the story we've been given, the mythic version, the one that (if anything can) aspires to make a kind of sense. It's a rendering in which the pieces fit together and the terror of the day is mitigated by small moments of redemption, whispers of epiphany and grace.

The problem, however, is that none of it happened -- or more accurately, none of it happened exactly like that. Instead, Cullen points out, the Columbine story was obscured from the outset: first, by the misperceptions of the witnesses, and then, almost immediately, by the misreporting of the media, which at its worst resembled nothing so much as an enormous game of telephone. "The Columbine situation played out slowly," Cullen writes, "with the cameras rolling. Or at least it appeared that way: the cameras offered the illusion we were witnessing the event. But the cameras arrived too late. . . . We saw fragments. What the cameras showed us was misleading. . . . The data was correct; the conclusions were wrong."

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"World's End" by Pablo Neruda

"World's End" by Pablo Neruda
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Reviewed By Richard Rayner
LA Times

"World's End," originally published in Spanish in 1969, toward the end of the career of the great poet Pablo Neruda (he died in 1973, soon after the coup that killed his friend and compatriot Chilean President Salvador Allende), is a book-length sequence that weaves together the personal and the political, the public and the private, the domestic and the global. For Neruda, poetry meant much more than the expression of emotion and personality. It was a sacred way of being and came with duties. He wrote poetry to explain himself to himself, but he had a mission to shape the world too. He was opposed to W.H. Auden's famous declaration: "Poetry makes nothing happen."

Ambitious in every sense

Neruda didn't buy that for a moment. For him, poetry could change everything. He lived a life of passionate engagement and his work was ambitious in every sense. He was, as American poet Campbell McGrath has written, "president of Pablo Neruda Enterprises / director of the great public works project: Pablo Neruda." "World's End" -- here translated into English in full for the first time by William O'Daly in a bilingual edition -- balances nothing less than the tumult of a century against a lifetime's personal vision.

Neruda personally experienced many key historical events (the Spanish Civil War, for example, in which his friend and fellow poet Lorca was assassinated) and bore witness to others. Here he rants full-on against U.S. involvement in Vietnam: "Why were they compelled to kill / innocents so far from home, / while the crimes pour cream / into the pockets of Chicago? / Why go so far to kill / Why go so far to die?" Elsewhere he rebukes (and excuses) himself for having believed in the tyrant Stalin for too long, remaining loyal to "el partido" even when other leading writers and intellectuals drawn, like him, to Marxism and the Soviet Union during the turbulence of the 1930s, had long since rejected Moscow's leash. "I was unaware of that which we were unaware," he writes. "But light was discovered / and we recovered our reason: / not for any man or his crime / would we throw the good / into the cellar of the wicked."

This may not seem like much of a mea culpa, but Neruda the idealist struggled to come to terms with the failure of the Soviet experiment even while he railed against an America that, he believed, had moved dangerously beyond the traditions of freedom and democracy expounded by Lincoln and Whitman, the poet whom Neruda revered above all others. Neruda described "World's End" as his "bitter book," and one of its subjects, certainly, is disillusion. "I have taken a kick / from time and it is now a mess, / the sad box of my life," he writes. "I cannot show people / my collection of shivers: / I felt lonely in a house / riddled with leaks / in a downpour that heard no appeal."

The desolation recalls his earlier groundbreaking book "Residence on Earth." There's the same sense of life turned to ashes and strangeness, wonderfully expressed. But in Neruda the possibility of revival is never far away. That's why so many readers throughout the world still rely upon him. He sings of despair in tones that soon thrill again, using his verse like a shaft of light, cross-examining the darkness so that a switch can be turned, or a metaphor spun magically into something that sustains. "As a poet baker / I prepare the fire, the flour, / the leavening, the heart, / and I, involved up to the elbows, / kneading the light of the oven, / the green water of language, / so the bread that happens to me / sells itself in the bakery."

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'The Kindly Ones,' by Jonathan Littell

'The Kindly Ones,' by Jonathan Littell

Reviewed By Laila Lalami
LA Times

Literature has given us many unsympathetic protagonists yet relatively few genuine monsters: "Lolita's" Humbert Humbert, Shakespeare's Richard III and "American Psycho's" Patrick Bateman come to mind. In each case, the writer was successful because the reader was drawn into the narrative by the beauty of the language, a masterful use of point of view, or an intriguing personal life against which the monstrosity of the main character could be highlighted. In "The Kindly Ones," the Prix Goncourt-winning novel that has created a cultural sensation in France and is now being published in the United States, Jonathan Littell has done none of this, with the result that his novel reads like a pornographic catalog of horrors.

"The Kindly Ones" is ostensibly the memoir of Maximilien Aue, a legal scholar who joins the main intelligence branch within the SS and slowly rises through the echelons of power. As a Nazi officer, he witnesses or participates in the major events of World War II -- the Eastern Front, the Battle of Stalingrad, the massacres in Auschwitz -- but evades capture after the fall of the Third Reich. He flees to France, uses his prewar connections to start a lace business, marries, has children and grandchildren, and leads the quiet life of a petit bourgeois.

In occasional flashbacks, the reader discovers a few details about Aue's birth and upbringing. When Aue was just a young boy, his father, a German veteran of World War I, went to visit a relative and never returned. Aue's mother then married a Frenchman, moving the family to the Côte d'Azur. For several years, Aue carried on an incestuous relationship with his twin sister, Una, until the two were found out and swiftly separated. Aue later has many homosexual encounters because, he says, he hopes to replicate his sister's sexual pleasures with him. If you think this story is unpleasant, or convoluted, or tragically Greek, wait until you get to the last third of the book.

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'Beyond Uncertainty' by David C. Cassidy

'Beyond Uncertainty' by David C. Cassidy

Reviewed By Sara Lippincott
LA Times

In June 1925, while recuperating from hay fever on the pollen-free island of Helgoland in the North Sea, Werner Heisenberg conceived of the first mechanics for quantum theory -- a way to actually do it. He was 23 years old. Physicists are said to do their best work when they are barely out of their teens; this is a signal example. Until Heisenberg's breakthrough -- which soon came to be called matrix mechanics, because it manipulated matrices, or lattices, of numbers, with weird but satisfying results -- there was no real connection between Niels Bohr's semiclassical picture of quantum physics and the ground.

Two years later, Heisenberg came up with his now-famous (and widely co-opted by philosophers and playwrights) uncertainty principle, which in essence says you can't simultaneously pin down the location and momentum of a subatomic particle. It is one of the pillars of the so-called Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory, which upended classical Newtonian physics and revealed matter and energy as fundamentally discontinuous and unpredictable. End of physics lecture.

I have a photograph of Heisenberg on the wall of my office, taken shortly before his Helgoland epiphany. It's up there because for some reason it makes me feel good. Wearing a sweater that his mom might have knitted, he's smiling radiantly at the camera. The same photo is reproduced in "Beyond Uncertainty," David C. Cassidy's new biography of this controversial 20th century giant, in which he observes that in "snapshots of Heisenberg as a young man, he always appears radiant, confident, alert, and pleasant."

References to his subject's radiance and good nature even in the darker days of his later life occur throughout the book. It is also an excellent piece of science writing; in a chapter titled "Determining Uncertainty," Cassidy gives the clearest explanation I have ever come across of the mind-boggling arcana of quantum physics.

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'A Mind at Peace' by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar

'A Mind at Peace' by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar

Reviewed By Richard Eder
LA Times

Istanbul's inhabitants have called it "the city of two continents," part of it lying in Europe and part in Asia, with the waters of the Bosphorus joining them. Or separating them.

Which, though? The question is about national identity, not geography. Turkey has struggled with the question, certainly since Kemal Atatürk overthrew the Ottoman sultans in the early 1900s and imposed a Westernizing rule over an Eastern culture that remains part resistant and unassimilated to this day.

The theme has been famously treated by the novelist Orhan Pamuk. His "Snow" displays an indisputably Westernized writer's painful doubts about a century of forced transformation; one that not only remains stuck halfway but also, along with its benefits, has supressed some of the richness of the older heritage.

It is also the theme of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar's honeyed, searching and melancholy epic, written in the 1940s and only now translated into English. "A Mind at Peace" is far more elusive and diffuse than Pamuk's work. Much of it is difficult to gain access to for a non-Turkish reader, with its reams of talk about varieties of traditional music, and involved weighings of Turkish writers from the 19th and early 20th centuries.

The translation suggests English spoken with a foreign accent, and it lurches with oddity. This of course is a difficulty; at the same time, it has the transporting quality of such an accent, imparting in the reader the heartbeat of an unfamiliar world.(Would we even remember Marlene Dietrich if she'd spoken Oxbridge English?)

In any case, Tanpinar (1901-1962) has produced a work that, despite its long and (to us) obscure side trips, creates a portrait of a city and a culture -- Istanbul on the eve of World War II -- that seems like the land of Cockaigne, magical and lost. His novel is as much about its setting and colors (the green of an Emerald City) as about the stories and wonderfully eccentric and varied panoply of characters.

The play of sun on water, the Bosphorus ferries that ply back and forth to villa-studded islands, the lights that star its shores, the glint of bluefish netted at night, are also characters. At one point, the lovers at the center of the book reflect that these things, quite as much as each other, are the heart of their aching, doomed summer affair.

Doomed because Mumtaz, a young intellectual besotted with Baudelaire and weightless cogitating; and Nuran, an older woman from an established family and divorced, perhaps temporarily, from a faithless husband, come to represent Turkey's East-West divide. The life and artistry that Tanpinar gives to the ardor and fragility of their affair occupy his book's middle section, which stands as one of the 20th century's notable literary love stories and cultural watersheds.

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'How We Decide' by Jonah Lehrer

'How We Decide' by Jonah Lehrer

Reviewed By Gordon Marino
LA Times


Honey Nut Cheerios or regular Cheerios. The Caribbean or Hawaii. To be human is to be endlessly jostled by choice. Decisions are earnest business. How should we make them?

Philosophers such as Plato and Descartes thought it best if pure reason decided everything. The heirs of Socrates pictured the passions as intoxicants interfering with our ability to think clearly. It was not until Soren Kierkegaard that some philosophers acknowledged that there is a cognitive dimension to emotion, and later, that reason and emotion may not be entirely separate agencies. In his latest offering, "How We Decide," Jonah Lehrer explores the nexus of thought and feeling in the decision-making process.

Lehrer begins by debunking the notion that we should all make our decisions like hyper-rational Mr. Spock. Lehrer, who also wrote "Proust Was a Neuroscientist," observes that perfectly intelligent people become virtually unable to make the most trivial decisions when their capacity for feelings are flattened as a result of brain disease or trauma. This is no surprise. Emotions inject our mental representations with direction and intensity.

Lehrer maintains that there are many cases in which the unfeeling intellect is simply doltish. Pondering the split-second judgments of quarterbacks, pilots and firefighters, Lehrer shows that if conscious reason were all we had, it would be impossible to make solid nanosecond decisions.

Lehrer recounts one of the book's riveting stories. In the heat of the Persian Gulf War, Royal Navy Lt. Cmdr. Michael Riley was manning a shipboard radar station when he picked up a blip showing something heading toward the Missouri. The projectile had the profile of both an incoming coalition A-6 aircraft and an enemy Silkworm missile. Riley had no criteria for deciding between the two and was tortuously suspended between the possibilities of allowing a strike and blasting his brothers-in-arms out of the sky. But, Riley said, "There was something strange about this radar blip. It didn't feel like an A-6."

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'Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America' by Louis Adamic

'Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America' by Louis Adamic

Reviewed By Richard Rayner, LA Times

Louis Adamic is the forgotten Boswell of early Los Angeles, perhaps the first writer to tune himself into the then-youthful city and report back. Born in Slovenia in either 1898 or 1899 (records differ), he passed through Ellis Island in 1913 and served in the U.S. Army during World War I before settling in San Pedro where, through most of the 1920s, he worked as a watchman in the office of the harbor pilot. Great ocean liners passed in front of his window, and at dusk, the wireless stations on battleships sent forth flashes of light.

It's a striking picture, evoked by Carey McWilliams, who noted that his friend Adamic was always more at home in San Pedro than in the "fleshpots of Los Angeles," then in the midst of a crazy, oil-driven boom. Yet it was Los Angeles that inspired Adamic. "He thrived on Los Angeles. He reveled in its freaks, fakirs, and frauds," McWilliams wrote.

Adamic became not only a historian and sociologist of the city, but its prophet too. It was he who first called it an "enormous village" and got at the soul of what he thought of as a bad place, "full of old dying people, and young people who were born old of tired pioneer parents, victims of America -- full of curious wild and poisonous growths, decadent religions and cults and fake science, and wildcat business enterprises, which, with their aim for quick profits, are doomed to collapse and drag down multitudes of people."

Adamic gathered his impressions in "Laughing in the Jungle," a memoir published in 1932. It was his second important book. The first, "Dynamite," appeared the previous year and was revised in 1935. This latter version has just been reissued, with a foreword by labor historian Jon Bekken.

"Dynamite" -- subtitled "The Story of Class Violence in America" -- had a troubled route to publication. Adamic originally intended to tell the story of the 1910 bombing of the Los Angeles Times, an act of terrorism that killed more than 20 people. Two brothers, James and John McNamara, were found guilty, and Adamic saw in this drama a microcosm of the social and economic forces that in the early 20th century brought Los Angeles, and parts of the country at large, to the brink of socialism and revolution. He unearthed a great stack of material, reconstructed the saga detail by detail -- and then failed to publish all his findings.

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'The Yankee Years' by Joe Torre and Tom Verducci

'The Yankee Years'
By Joe Torre and Tom Verducci

Review By David Ulin
LA Times


Last week, as the controversy over Joe Torre and Tom Verducci's "The Yankee Years" was ratcheting up, I got an e-mail from my brother, who, like me, is a lifelong New York Yankees fan. "As I understand it," he wrote, "Torre is saying NYY is a tough place to work, very 'What have you done for me lately?' and if your name is not Piniella or Jeter, everyone is out to get you. No news there."

This is the reality for the Yankee faithful and has been since George Steinbrenner took control of the team in 1973. As for Torre's revelations that Alex Rodriguez is high-maintenance (No!) or that General Manager Brian Cashman failed to stand by him after the 2007 season . . . tell me something I don't know.

As it turns out, that's precisely what "The Yankee Years" does, providing an unexpectedly thoughtful, even nuanced, history not only of Torre's 12 years as manager of the Yankees but of Major League Baseball during that time. It's a period ripe for just this sort of overview: the steroid era, the rise of moneyball.

When Torre took over the Yankees in 1996, baseball was less than two years removed from the catastrophic strike that stopped the 1994 season, forcing the cancellation of the World Series for the first time since 1904.

By 2007, when he left the team after losing the American League division series to the Cleveland Indians, baseball was huge business despite the exposure of some of its biggest stars ( Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds) as alleged cheaters, transformed by a new generation of executives who made decisions based on advanced statistical analyses.

On the surface, none of this appears to have much to do with the Yankees: Although Clemens and others on the 2000 team have been embroiled in the steroids scandal, the team never had an ingrown culture of cheating, while the new age, numbers-crunching style of management demands a patience Steinbrenner lacks.

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"Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age" by Steve Knopper

"Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age"
By Steve Knopper

Reviewed By Erik Himmelsbach
LA Times


Few industries inspire more enmity than the record business. It's been tainted since the birth of rock, with transgressions that include payola, greed, a reactionary aversion to technology and a plantation mentality toward its bread and butter -- the recording artists.

Thanks to the Internet and the MP3 revolution, karmic justice has finally been served: The record industry has toppled like a house of cards. To many, its collapse is less a crisis than a beautiful sunset.

Yet as Steve Knopper notes in "Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age," this was a business hellbent on destroying itself for at least 30 years. Digital music was merely the final dagger in its heart.

Knopper, a Rolling Stone music business writer, thoughtfully reports on the record racket's slow, painful march into financial ruin and irrelevance, starting with the near-catastrophic sales slump that began in 1979 after the demise of disco. Though the labels persevered, they finally lost control of their product when they chose to ignore the possibilities of the Internet.

Now, it's consumers and recording artists who have the power. Musicians can create, produce and distribute their work without the indentured servitude of record labels.

That's great news for younger artists, but even geezers like the Eagles and Paul McCartney have taken advantage of the new technology.

To read the entire review by Erik Himmelsbach, please click here.

'Street Gang' by Michael Davis

By Diana Wagman (LA TIMES)

Big Bird snorts cocaine. Mr. Hooper uses his store as a front for stolen goods. Oscar the Grouch keeps pornography in his trash can.

If these are the stories you are looking for, too bad. "Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street" is not a Hollywood tell-all. No puppeteer hung himself by his own strings; Cookie Monster was not discovered on a casting couch. It is not even set in Hollywood. "Sesame Street" was inspired, imagined, sold and created out of the civil rights movement in New York City. And seemingly everyone involved with it was as altruistic and munificent as the theme song:


On my way

to where the air is sweet.

Can you tell me how to get,

how to get to Sesame Street?

Yes, we get a little past-tense womanizing, a lot of drinking and a psychotic breakdown later in the book, but it all seems sad, not salacious, and not germane to the basic story. "Street Gang" is journalist Michael Davis' tale of a woman, Joan Ganz Cooney, who had an idea at a dinner party and, despite plenty of opposition, fought her way to creating a show for preschoolers that would change television as we know it.

To read the rest of Diana Wagman's review of "Street Gang" by Michael Davis please click here.