bookpagedev

Sports

Little Rock, Arkansas, then and now

Review by bookpagedev

In 1957, nine African-American teenagers integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, which is considered a milestone in American civil rights history. Sadly, not much progress has been made in Little Rock since. Though ostensibly a football book, Jay Jennings’ Carry the Rock provides a sobering, unfiltered history of the city’s race relations.

Jennings returned to his hometown in 2007 to cover Central High School’s football team, perennially one of the state’s best, and to take a long look at the town 50 years after its historic act. The season was a disappointment, as longtime coach Bernie Cox struggled to reach his players and recapture the glory of past teams. This team lacked togetherness, which was a common theme in the school—the student body president’s college-admissions essay described the lack of interaction between blacks and whites—and in the city. Despite countless legal battles to promote diversity in the schools, for years white households have sent their kids to private schools or have moved to the surrounding suburbs. Neighborhoods are defined by race, with the completion of I-630 in 1985 serving as a dividing line. Little Rock’s Board of Education didn’t have a black majority until 2006, and when the school system hired its first black superintendent, it ended with an enraged Board of Education and legal agony.

Even the celebration of Central’s integration leaves alumni and residents with mixed feelings. Ralph Brodie, the student body president in 1957, wrote a book declaring that the white students who went about their business that year deserved praise and that “everyone who stepped inside Central High that year exhibited courage every day.” However, Jennings says, “There were lingering doubts in the black community about the degree to which Little Rock’s white citizens were willing, or have ever been willing, to accept responsibility for the historic, and the continuing, divisiveness in the city.”

Though Jennings doesn’t tie together the book’s three elements (the city’s racial climate, Central’s 50th anniversary and the football team’s travails), he shows that a sweeping social change does not guarantee acceptance—that many courageous, selfless acts must still be performed year after year, and there are no assurances that those acts will be acknowledged.

 

In 1957, nine African-American teenagers integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, which is considered a milestone in American civil rights history. Sadly, not much progress has been made in Little Rock since. Though ostensibly a football book, Jay Jennings’ Carry the Rock provides…

Business & Finance

Star implosion

Review by bookpagedev

Is it possible to be too successful? Yes, says popular executive coach Marshall Goldsmith. It’s all too common for a company’s brightest stars to fade or even implode because the behaviors that helped them climb the mountain keep them from reaching the top. Companies pay Goldsmith big bucks to teach their best and brightest how to get rid of the everyday behaviors that drive their officemates nuts and sabotage their success. It’s an investment that often costs $250,000. Fortunately, he captures his thoughtful advice in What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful.

Instead of requiring a personality overhaul or listing new skills to learn, Goldsmith identifies 20 simple day-to-day behavioral habits including playing favorites, not listening and displaying too much negativity that damage relationships. He advocates using the 360-degree feedback technique that gathers input from bosses, peers and direct reports to find the blind spots of behavior that others see and you don’t.

Once you’re aware of the issues, Goldsmith explains a three-step process to fix the problem, starting with apologizing. His advice is straightforward and easy to follow with concrete suggestions like fining yourself for every sentence you start with but. Losing a few bucks might hurt, but you’ll see results whether you’re a CEO or just getting started.

Stephanie Gerber is a marketing executive in Louisville.

Is it possible to be too successful? Yes, says popular executive coach Marshall Goldsmith. It's all too common for a company's brightest stars to fade or even implode because the behaviors that helped them climb the mountain keep them from reaching the top. Companies pay…
HistoryAmerican History

Two men on two very different journeys

Review by bookpagedev

In Bloody Crimes, James Swanson returns to the historical vicinity of his 2006 bestseller Manhunt. That book offered a gripping, swift-moving account of the pursuit of Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, and his accomplices. Bloody Crimes tells the story of two different journeys that unfolded at nearly the same time as the hunt for Booth.

The first journey is the flight of Confederate President Jefferson Davis from Richmond, Virginia, after General Robert E. Lee informed him on April 2, 1865, that his army could no longer protect the South’s capital. Part of Swanson’s subtitle calls this “the chase for Jefferson Davis.” But one of the more interesting elements of his account is the sense that a good many Union commanders (including Lincoln himself) seemed to hope that Davis would escape and not leave them with the thorny task of deciding whether or not to execute him. In addition, Davis’ flight was strangely indecisive. A man of old-school dignity and honor, he delayed and delayed, hoping to rally supporters and carry on the good fight while his armies surrendered and his allies drifted away. In this account at least, his capture feels almost like an afterthought.

The second journey is the extraordinary train trip of Lincoln’s corpse across the country for burial in Springfield, Illinois, during which time his body was displayed to hundreds of thousands of mourners in cities along the route. Swanson’s account shows just how amazing and emotional this journey was and provides context for understanding how this “death pageant for Lincoln’s corpse” (as the engagingly lurid subtitle calls it) shaped our notions of national mourning.

Swanson quotes liberally from period memoirs and documents. This lends a you-are-there feel to the book, but these passages also clearly show that Jefferson Davis simply was not as eloquent nor as reflective as Lincoln. Davis outlived Lincoln by many years, publishing memoirs, relying on support from friends and a loyal wife and garnering resounding adulation near the end of his life from Confederate veterans. But in some small part because of his body’s long trip home, Abraham Lincoln seems have garnered something different and larger: Call it immortality.

 
 

In Bloody Crimes, James Swanson returns to the historical vicinity of his 2006 bestseller Manhunt. That book offered a gripping, swift-moving account of the pursuit of Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, and his accomplices. Bloody Crimes tells the story of two different journeys that…

Social Science

Stepping around big footprints

Review by bookpagedev

As architectural critic for the New Yorker, Paul Goldberger has followed plans for rebuilding the World Trade Center site since early 2002. It is what he calls the most challenging urban-design problem of the 21st century. Goldberger provides the fascinating backstory of the design process in the engrossing Up From Zero: Politics, Architecture, and the Rebuilding of New York.

The WTC project, already surrounded by the conflicting forces of political power, money, and architecture and planning, was made even more difficult, he says, by the still-fresh memory of the attacks and the cultural significance of the destroyed towers. But Minoru Yamasaki’s towers weren’t always so beloved, explains Goldberger, commenting on our changing relationship to architecture and how structures once hated think Eiffel Tower eventually become accepted parts of the landscape. Given the towers’ ascendance to landmark status, it is perhaps easy to understand why some people felt they should be rebuilt.

To others, who felt that building anything on the site amounted to sacrilege, restoring the towers was tantamount to pretending September 11 never happened. The challenge facing architects and the powers that be The Port Authority, developer Larry Silverstein, mayors Giuliani and later Bloomberg, Governor Pataki, etc. was that of balancing a fitting memorial with the replacement of a significant amount of commercial real estate while working it all into a neighborhood plan for lower Manhattan. Goldberger not only goes behind the scenes of the planning process, he provides mini-profiles of people like Daniel Libeskind, David Childs, Rafael Vi–oly, Santiago Calatrava and Maya Lin and describes their work in terms accessible to the lay reader. He chronicles the give-and-take that led to the selection of Libeskind’s overall plan, the modifications by Silverstein-associated architect Childs and the incorporation of Michael Arad’s Reflecting Absence memorial.

Up From Zero provides a clear, evenhanded exploration of the attempt to present a powerful statement of resilience and remembrance through aesthetics. Pulitzer Prize winner Goldberg also sets the stage for the continuing drama associated with the WTC site: just weeks after the Freedom Tower groundbreaking this summer, master plan architect Libeskind sued Silverstein for unpaid fees.

As architectural critic for the New Yorker, Paul Goldberger has followed plans for rebuilding the World Trade Center site since early 2002. It is what he calls the most challenging urban-design problem of the 21st century. Goldberger provides the fascinating backstory of the design process…
Social Science

Redefining the Enlightenment

Review by bookpagedev

In her stimulating and, for some, controversial book The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments, historian Gertrude Himmelfarb seeks to reclaim the Enlightenment from French thinkers such as Voltaire and Diderot and restore it to the British, where it began. The French have acknowledged their debt to Newton and Locke, but these thinkers did not significantly influence those of Himmelfarb’s British Enlightenment. She focuses instead on moral philosophers such as the third Earl of Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, Edward Gibbon and others. The emphasis in France was on reason, while in England these thinkers were more concerned with the social virtues of compassion, benevolence and sympathy. In America, religion was an ally, not an enemy. Himmelfarb makes a convincing case for redefining the Enlightenment, making it both more British and more inclusive by welcoming figures such as John Wesley and Edmund Burke. In Britain the moral philosophers were reformists, but not subversive, while in France, reason became the ideology to challenge religion, the church and other institutions.

Burke wrote of the commonality of human nature in numerous works. Wesley believed that Christianity was essentially a social religion, and Methodist preachers engaged in a variety of humanitarian endeavors that were practical expressions of the ideas of the moral philosophers. In America, political liberty was the primary concern. As Himmelfarb points out, it was on slavery that the politics of liberty dramatically clashed with the sociology of virtue. The Roads to Modernity is a thoughtful and wide-ranging discussion of an important period in the history of ideas. Roger Bishop is a Nashville bookseller and frequent contributor to BookPage.

In her stimulating and, for some, controversial book The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments, historian Gertrude Himmelfarb seeks to reclaim the Enlightenment from French thinkers such as Voltaire and Diderot and restore it to the British, where it began. The French…
Fiction

Hiding from the fickle finger of fate

Review by bookpagedev

For Americans born after 1955, polio has had about as much immediate emotional impact as the Black Death, and thus it’s hard to conjure up the sense of terror that surrounded any mention of the disease barely half a century ago. In his new novel, Nemesis, Philip Roth evokes his native Newark amid a raging epidemic in 1944, focusing on one decent man’s futile struggle to understand the seemingly random way that health and sickness, life and death are dealt out to those around him.

Popular young athlete and high school physical education teacher Eugene “Bucky” Cantor has been hired to manage a playground for the summer in the city’s Jewish Weequahic section. Soon, some of the adolescent boys who spend the long summer days playing baseball there are stricken, and panic spreads in the community as parents blame the outbreak on everything from Italian toughs spitting on the sidewalk to overly vigorous physical activity.

Despairing of any hope of stemming the outbreak, Bucky flees, like Marcus Messner, the protagonist of Roth’s Indignation, to a place of apparent safety: a summer camp in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains where his fiancée works as a counselor. But any pleasure he derives from their reunion is thwarted by his realization that, in abandoning the steamy, disease-riddled streets of Newark, “what he no longer had was a conscience he could live with,” and he resolves to abandon his summertime idyll.

In Greek mythology, Nemesis was the spirit of divine retribution against those who yielded to hubris, or arrogance against the gods. Philip Roth’s well-known atheism undermines any notion that the harsh punishment inflicted on Bucky, who rails against God’s “lunatic cruelty” in striking down blameless 12-year-old boys, reflects Roth’s belief in any sort of divine judgment. Instead, he reminds us, “Sometimes you’re lucky and sometimes you’re not. Any biography is chance, and, beginning at conception, chance—the tyranny of contingency—is everything.” Bucky Cantor’s failure to grasp that harsh truth, Roth suggests in this characteristically bleak but unfailingly honest story, is the flaw that delivers him to his fate.

 

For Americans born after 1955, polio has had about as much immediate emotional impact as the Black Death, and thus it’s hard to conjure up the sense of terror that surrounded any mention of the disease barely half a century ago. In his new novel,…

Fiction

A delightful, magical witches brew

Review by bookpagedev

Who’d have known? Apparently there are strict rules of behavior for witches in this world, and many of these rules aim at preserving a fairly conventional moral structure. Furthermore, all witches take the “beneficium pledge,” which could be confused with the Girl Scout oath. At least, that’s how Camille DeAngelis’ world of witches operates, and indeed, this reader wouldn’t have it any other way. Otherwise, the morally responsible half of Petty Magic’s dual personality—the part that describes witch Evelyn’s battle against the Nazis in World War II—would sound a mite dubious. Ordinarily, one would expect a witch to fight for the Nazis, not against them. But that’s not what happens here.

Evelyn (known as Eve) is 149 years old, but with the pass of a finger over her face and the right words, she can still look and act young and beautiful. She lives with other witches in buildings that were long ago torn down, and she rarely cooks the “slow” way, preferring to conjure up dishes with, perhaps, a wink of an eye. Against this background, DeAngelis works in that far more serious subplot involving the underground battle against the Nazis in Europe, where Eve finds and loses her true love, Jonah. Somehow DeAngelis manages to give each of these accounts, past and present, its own space, though things tighten up a bit when Eve runs into Jonah’s dead ringer, Justin, 60 years later.

Full of engaging characters, from the family parrot, who is “working his way through the metaphysical poets,” to Eve’s well-meaning, witchy family, who have a mystery of their own that must be investigated, Petty Magic pulls off the magic of being, at the same time, serious and tongue-in-cheek. If you’re a witch, petty magic is what you’ll amuse yourself with in your old age. But readers of all ages will be enchanted by this novel and, in the end, unwilling to break its spell.

 

Who'd have known? Apparently there are strict rules of behavior for witches in this world, and many of these rules aim at preserving a fairly conventional moral structure. Furthermore, all witches take the “beneficium pledge,” which could be confused with the Girl Scout oath. At least,…

Fiction

Exploring a troubled subconscious

Review by bookpagedev

Do we need language? To what extent is identity tied to expression, and to what extent is it something innate, preverbal? What if you were suddenly unable to speak your native tongue, but remained painfully cognizant of everything said around you? Ruiyan Xu’s poignant and impressive debut, The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai, explores such conundrums.

The book opens with a dramatically rendered scene: a Shanghai hotel torn apart by a massive and violent gas explosion. Among the survivors is Li Jing, a businessman who has sustained severe head injuries. Although he initially seems fine, the doctors quickly diagnose a terrible condition: Broca’s aphasia, which hinders Li’s ability to speak—though not to understand—a single word of Chinese. Curiously, he is able to communicate in almost perfect English, a language he has not used since childhood, when he lived briefly in the United States. His newfound speechlessness devastates not only Li but also his beloved wife, Meiling, who finds her once effusive and loquacious husband suddenly dull and foreign. Meanwhile, an American neurologist, Rosalyn Neal, is flown halfway around the world to work with Li on unraveling his linguistic web. But as the recently divorced and decidedly culture-shocked physician grows to understand—and care deeply—for her patient, she also learns that restoring one’s “former life” is never as easy as it seems.

Xu, who was born in Shanghai and moved to New York City when she was 10 years old, no doubt understands the dualities and misalignments of the bilingual mind, and her writing shines most when she delves deeply into Li’s troubled subconscious. She struggles, however, with plot and pacing, working too hard, at times, to turn her characters’ inner turmoil into outward action. Still, this first novel compels on both intellectual and emotional levels, calling into question the nature and necessity of one of our most uniquely human abilities.

 

Do we need language? To what extent is identity tied to expression, and to what extent is it something innate, preverbal? What if you were suddenly unable to speak your native tongue, but remained painfully cognizant of everything said around you? Ruiyan Xu’s poignant and…

Fiction

Past holds writer hostage in the present

Review by bookpagedev

Meet Tom Bedford. Like Nicholas Evans, the author who created him, Tom grew up in England, became infatuated with the American West, worked in Hollywood and ultimately chose writing as his profession. But unlike Evans, who established a following with his blockbuster hit The Horse Whisperer and lives with his wife, our protagonist has only a moderately satisfying writing career and dwells in an empty house he built with his ex-wife, whom he still loves. Tom, it is clear from the start, is stuck in a number of ways. He is estranged from his son, Danny, who is fighting in Iraq and on the brink of a life-changing tragedy. And a secret from Tom’s past—the truth of what happened to his beautiful actress mother—has shaped his life. Concealing that secret has required an astonishing number of lies.

When Tom becomes infatuated with a young writer, he imagines sharing the truth about his past with her. But he can’t, believing that it would be too great a betrayal to those who mean the most to him. He reflects, “That was the thing with lies. Like the gnarled and twisted pines that grew along the Front Range, the longer they lived the stronger they became.”

The Brave is an engrossing tale that deals mainly with clearing out these lies and examining the past that produced them, suggesting that, as Faulkner said, “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” Fans of The Horse Whisperer won’t want to miss this complex and satisfying story. For readers who have not had the pleasure of reading Evans, but are looking to get lost in a big novel with larger-than-life characters, The Brave is sure to fit the bill.
 

Meet Tom Bedford. Like Nicholas Evans, the author who created him, Tom grew up in England, became infatuated with the American West, worked in Hollywood and ultimately chose writing as his profession. But unlike Evans, who established a following with his blockbuster hit The Horse…

Business & Finance

A midlife crisis at 25

Review by bookpagedev

For the disillusioned 20-somethings who are dissatisfied with work, life and love, Jason Ryan Dorsey has a wake-up call. More than a career guide, My Reality Check Bounced: The Twentysomething’s Guide to Cashing In on Your Real-World Dreams tackles the ennui that many college grads feel after hitting the real-world rut of overtime and credit card bills. Dorsey’s message is one of empowerment: Stand up and create your own life. NOW. That’s what Dorsey did when he dropped out of college to self-publish his first book, Graduate to Your Perfect Job, now required reading at 1,500 schools. That experience lets Dorsey connect and empathize with his audience without sounding cynical. None of his concepts are groundbreaking, but Dorsey puts old ideas into today’s language. He gets readers motivated to wake up every morning by creating a future picture. Networking becomes plugging in and chapters end with instant messages that detail specific actions to start immediately. Included throughout are examples of self-defeating thoughts that bounce ( My happiness is out of my hands. ) and motivational ideas you can take to the bank ( How I feel about my life is determined by how I choose to live my life. ) For boomerangers, the restless grads who have moved back home with their parents and are awaiting pointers toward a new life, Dorsey’s message should serve as an emphatic kick in the butt.

For the disillusioned 20-somethings who are dissatisfied with work, life and love, Jason Ryan Dorsey has a wake-up call. More than a career guide, My Reality Check Bounced: The Twentysomething's Guide to Cashing In on Your Real-World Dreams tackles the ennui that many college grads…
Fiction

Digging deep in the land of Israel

Review by bookpagedev

Family life can be like a journey—an expedition filled with delights and sorrow, a mixture of monotony and surprises, with a few unexpected side trips. In David Grossman’s amazing new novel, To the End of the Land, he combines literal travel with the passages of life; as the main characters hike around Israel, they renew their friendship through deep conversation, relating stories that range from the personal to the mundane and revealing a few closely held secrets.

Ora, newly divorced, is planning a camping trip through the Galilee with her younger son, Ofer. When he rejoins the army, she panics and decides to take the trip on her own, rationalizing, somewhat fantastically, that if she can’t be informed of his death, then he can’t die. At the last minute, she coerces her reclusive friend Avram into accompanying her. As they wander the hills, Ora keeps up a steady monologue, describing Ofer from birth to adulthood, in the hopes that maintaining a laser-like focus on domestic minutiae will keep him alive.

The background to this conversation is a complicated history among three friends. Ora, Avram and Ora’s ex-husband Ilan met as teenagers when they were all hospitalized with a debilitating illness. The attraction that both men felt for Ora tested their friendship, and their relationships were further tried when Avram was held as a POW in Egypt and brutally tortured after the 1973 Yom Kippur war. Although Ora and Ilan eventually married and had children, they continued to care for Avram until he cut himself off from their family, refusing to meet their two sons and working only the most menial of jobs. As Ora recounts the many stories of her family life, Avram is able to make a kind of human connection that he has long shunned and feels himself regaining some of the creative spirit he thought he’d lost.

Grossman contrasts the tragic consequences of war with the soundtrack of everyday motherhood in such a way that the surreality of life in contemporary Israel is placed in high relief. Politics infiltrates everything, and the toll it takes on Ora’s family, from her sons’ enlistment to the ambivalence she feels she must hide from them, is almost too much for her to bear.

Those who are already familiar with Grossman may know that he lost his own son in the Second Lebanon War of 2006. Though much of this book was written before that date, it is impossible to read To the End of the Land without wondering how that loss may have affected his point of view. Always a writer of provocative technique and a fearless approach to life’s most profound questions, Grossman digs deeply here, with powerful results.

 

Family life can be like a journey—an expedition filled with delights and sorrow, a mixture of monotony and surprises, with a few unexpected side trips. In David Grossman’s amazing new novel, To the End of the Land, he combines literal travel with the passages of…

The future is filled with challenge and opportunity

Review by bookpagedev

Laurence C. Smith’s The World in 2050 is quite a calm book, considering the world changes it envisions. A professor of geography and earth and spaces sciences at UCLA, Smith attempts to assay what is most likely to happen on a global scale over the next 40 years. Some of his predictions are disturbing, but none is apocalyptic.

Smith points to four major engines of change: population growth; the increasing demand for natural resources; economic and cultural globalization; and climate change. He looks into conventional and experimental energy sources and concludes that oil and coal will continue to dominate for the foreseeable future; wind and solar energy will only be marginally important. Fresh water will run perilously low, leading in some cases to the privatization of water supplies. Securing sufficient potable water, Smith says, “is very possibly the greatest challenge of our century.”

The most fortunate region of the world by 2050, Smith speculates, will be the northern rim of nations that includes the upper United States, Canada, Russia and the Scandinavian countries. Here there are still plenteous stores of oil, natural gas, water and arable land. The melting of ice in the Arctic Ocean has opened that area up for mineral exploration and extraction and increased the number and reach of shipping lanes. The nations sharing this area have so far opted for negotiation over confrontation, and in most of them, the aboriginal inhabitants have successfully asserted control over large portions of their original tribal lands.

In the end, Smith does not see humanity as merely a passive observer and victim of all these seismic shifts. “To me,” he says, “the most important question is not of capacity, but of desire. What kind of world do we want?”

 

Laurence C. Smith’s The World in 2050 is quite a calm book, considering the world changes it envisions. A professor of geography and earth and spaces sciences at UCLA, Smith attempts to assay what is most likely to happen on a global scale over the…

Biography

Leading man

Review by bookpagedev

Photographs tell the story in Paul Newman: A Life in Pictures, a celebratory look at the Hollywood iconoclast, race car driver, family man, philanthropist and salad dressing king. Co-authors Pierre-Henri Verlhac and Yann-Brice Dherbier created this hefty coffee table book with the approval of Newman, now 81. From his days at the Actors Studio, circa 1955, to the present, the book reflects a journey that, happily, continues to this day. Los Angeles-based writer Pat H. Broeske is the co-author of biographies of Howard Hughes and Elvis Presley.

Photographs tell the story in Paul Newman: A Life in Pictures, a celebratory look at the Hollywood iconoclast, race car driver, family man, philanthropist and salad dressing king. Co-authors Pierre-Henri Verlhac and Yann-Brice Dherbier created this hefty coffee table book with the approval of Newman,…

Sign Up

Stay on top of new releases: Sign up for our newsletter to receive reading recommendations in your favorite genres.

Sign up now

Trending Features

All Features