bookpagedev

Fiction

Solving a Mormon murder mystery

Review by bookpagedev

At the end of the 19th century, Ann Eliza Young, the 19th wife of Mormon leader Brigham Young, embarked on a one-woman crusade to end polygamy in America. She published two memoirs about her experience as a plural wife and became one of the leading public speakers of her day. Her much-publicized divorce and outspoken apostasy helped bring about a reform of polygamy laws in the 1890s. David Ebershoff’s timely new novel, The 19th Wife, mixes fictionalized excerpts from Young’s memoir with a contemporary murder mystery that takes place in a Mormon sect very similar to the Yearning for Zion ranch that was in the news so much this spring.

Jordan is 20 years old, gay and living in Pasadena, with a decent job and a dog. He is completely estranged from the polygamous community where he grew up, and no wonder. At age 14, he was taken to the side of the road and literally dumped there. His wryly funny, rarely bitter voice is one of the rich rewards of the novel. When Jordan hears that his mother, the 19th of 20-something wives, has been arrested for her husband’s murder, he knows instinctively that she is innocent. He returns to Utah to solve the mystery, which means facing his family, the community and the faith that abandoned him.

Although Ann Eliza Young’s memoir exists (and can be read online via Google Books), Ebershoff has chosen to fictionalize sections, as well as create period documents such as articles, letters and interviews. These round out Ann Eliza’s story and offer "eyewitness" accounts of early Mormon life from her parents and son, as well as from Brigham Young himself. Similarly, Jordan’s personal story is enriched by characters he meets along his journey: a young runaway, a hotel clerk and most significantly, a Mormon scholar whose research subject is Ann Eliza Young and who has much to offer about the ways intellectual freedom enriches faith.

Ebershoff has clearly done his research, as the extensive bibliography shows, but the book never bogs down in dry, factual detail. The 19th Wife subtly relates the way Mormon history continues to affect present-day policies and realities with a surprising amount of insight and sensitivity, creating an entertaining, sympathetic and sometimes very funny novel.

Lauren Bufferd writes from Nashville.

At the end of the 19th century, Ann Eliza Young, the 19th wife of Mormon leader Brigham Young, embarked on a one-woman crusade to end polygamy in America. She published two memoirs about her experience as a plural wife and became one of the leading…

Fiction

To London, with hope

Review by bookpagedev

One could call Rose Tremain’s splendid new novel, The Road Home—which won Britain’s prestigious Orange Prize for Fiction in June—a novel of globalization, in so far as it tells a timely story of 21st-century immigration in multicultural London. But such a designation would fall far short of capturing the magic of Tremain’s subtle and sensitive portrait of a hopeful, hardworking, fundamentally good man trying to get a foothold in an often hostile foreign land.

Lev, a 42-year-old widower from an unnamed Eastern European country, has left his mother and young daughter behind in the little village where he worked in a lumber yard for 20 years, before the short-sighted post-totalitarian regime harvested the last of the trees. Arriving in London, unskilled, underfunded and with limited English, Lev is temporarily homeless, but too proud and ambitious to remain so for long. With the help of a woman he met on the long bus ride to England, he lands a job as a porter in the kitchen of a posh restaurant. It is one step up from slave labor, but Lev grasps the opportunity, and with uncomplaining diligence, proves himself not only a good worker, but also a fast learner who absorbs the fine points of the restaurant trade by observing.

He rents a room from Christy Slane, an Irish plumber who hit the alcoholic skids and, having lost his wife and most of the access to his daughter, is on the oft diverging road to recovery. Christy and Lev become more than landlord and tenant: they become fast friends, with the Irishman’s good-natured fatalism a welcome counterpoint to the new arrival’s more solemn industriousness. It is significant that Christy is himself an immigrant, as are the few others who deign to offer Lev help or comfort as he tries to settle into London life. The Indian proprietor of the bed-and-breakfast where he spends his first night, the Arab shop owner who gives him his first day’s labor, the two Chinese migrant farm workers he shares a caravan with during a stint picking vegetables—it is these fellow émigrés who offer him fleeting glimpses of human kindness, not the British-born who more often than not dismiss Lev with the epithet, "asylum seeker." When Lev does break into the Anglo world by having an affair with his co-worker, Sophie, it will, as Christy warns, end badly.

As he struggles to remain afloat in London and send money back home each week, Lev stays in touch with his oldest friend, Rudi, via cell phone. Rudi, a colorful schemer of outsized proportions, is both a lifeline to the familiar, if dismal, world Lev can’t help but miss, and an unwelcome shackle to sad memories of the painful cancer death of his young wife. As their native country struggles with its post-Communist future, Lev feels cut off, and he dreams of returning home in triumph, bringing with him the money and know-how acquired in the West. It is this seemingly unachievable ambition that drives the final pages of the novel with a kind of desperate optimism that the reader cannot help but embrace.

Based on a simple summary of the episodic plot, it might seem that Tremain is exploring well-trod ground in The Road Home. But she is such an able storyteller and Lev is such a well-drawn, sympathetic, even amiable character, that it is hard to set aside this book once begun. Though the story she tells is in some ways specific to London and to Lev’s unidentified homeland, it is impossible not to be reminded of a reality that often gets overlooked in the ongoing debate over immigration in our own country. Politics aside (and The Road Home is not first or foremost a political novel), Tremain makes us think deeply and forces us to care about the human souls that inhabit the faceless immigrant service workers we encounter—and often barely notice—every day. It is so easy to forget that those who cook our food, clean up after us, maybe care for our children, are people too, with aspirations that go far beyond the simple need to eat and live another day; that they have families and lovers and, perhaps most significantly, memories.

One should approach much-lauded, award-winning books with skepticism, but this time the Orange Prize committee got it right. Put The Road Home on your own shortlist.

(This column was first published in September 2008.)

One could call Rose Tremain's splendid new novel, The Road Home—which won Britain's prestigious Orange Prize for Fiction in June—a novel of globalization, in so far as it tells a timely story of 21st-century immigration in multicultural London. But such a designation would fall far…
Memoir

A son’s loving tribute

Review by bookpagedev

Jim Nantz’s Always By My Side: A Father’s Grace and a Sports Journey Unlike Any Other, written with Eli Spielman, takes the reader on a compelling journey. Part autobiography, part reminiscence, Always By My Side was inspired by CBS commentator Nantz’s 2007 broadcast triple play of calling three of sports’ grandest events–the Super Bowl, the Final Four and the Masters–in a 63-day period. The sweetness of that triumph was tempered by the fact that his father and namesake was succumbing to Alzheimer’s and could not share or even know of his son’s success. But Nantz discovered a truth that resonated throughout his life: no matter what the circumstance, his father was "always by his side." Moving and easily readable, Nantz’s story offers inside moments that will delight sports fans, while touching the heart of anyone who has watched a loved one slip into the deep fog of Alzheimer’s.

(This review was originally published in June 2008.)

Jim Nantz's Always By My Side: A Father's Grace and a Sports Journey Unlike Any Other, written with Eli Spielman, takes the reader on a compelling journey. Part autobiography, part reminiscence, Always By My Side was inspired by CBS commentator Nantz's 2007 broadcast triple play…

Biography

The extraordinary relationship of two literary pen pals

Review by bookpagedev

Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson corresponded for almost 25 years, yet met in person only twice. Beginning with a letter from the reclusive poet in 1862 to a literary figure she knew only through his essays and social activism, and lasting till her death in 1886, it is arguably one of the most important relationships in American literary history. In that initial letter, which included four of her poems, Dickinson famously asked, "Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?" Their connection, as described by Brenda Wineapple in her luminous new book, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, was "based on an absence, geographic distance, and the written word." After their first meeting at her home, in 1870, Higginson wrote that Dickinson "drained my nerve power so much. Without touching her, she drew from me. I am glad not to live near her." But he recognized her unique talent and wished to help her if he could. Though he admitted after Dickinson’s death that he could not teach her anything, Wineapple shows how Higginson’s encouragement and support were meaningful for both of them.

Wineapple, the acclaimed biographer of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Gertrude and Leo Stein, and Janet Flanner, makes a very persuasive case that Higginson, whose place in the poet’s life and work has often been downplayed, did indeed perform a singularly significant role. In their letters, she writes, "they invented themselves and each other, performing for each other in the words that filled, maintained, and created the space between them." They shared a passion for the natural world and literature; Wineapple demonstrates how through the years Dickinson dipped into Higginson’s work and rewrote it for her own poetic purposes.

She trusted and liked him and, as far as is known, there was no one else except her sister-in-law to whom she gave more of her poems. Only a few of Dickinson’s poems were published during her lifetime. Higginson played a central role in the posthumous publication of her work, collaborating with Mabel Loomis Todd in selecting and editing the first two volumes of poems. He found a publisher and wrote an introduction for the first volume. Higginson has often been criticized for changing the poems – eliminating Dickinson’s dashes at certain points and substituting more "appropriate" words – but this charge is probably not fair. Mrs. Todd, who copied many of the poems, admitted that it was she who made most of the changes.

White Heat succeeds magnificently in shining a light into the work of two unlikely friends. Dickinson did not live as isolated a life as we might imagine, while Higginson was indeed a radical activist, a supporter of John Brown, a strong advocate for women’s rights, and the leader of the first federally authorized regiment of freed slaves during the Civil War. But his compassion and literary sensibility were also at the heart of what he was about.

This book is not, Wineapple writes, conventional literary criticism or biography. She lets Dickinson’s poetry speak largely for itself, as Higginson first read it. The result gives us a powerful insight into two extraordinary figures who were there, in a rather unusual way, for each other.

Roger Bishop is a retired Nashville bookseller and a regular contributor to BookPage.

This review refers to the hardcover edition.

Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson corresponded for almost 25 years, yet met in person only twice. Beginning with a letter from the reclusive poet in 1862 to a literary figure she knew only through his essays and social activism, and lasting till her death…

Mystery & SuspenseMystery

Edgy Irish thriller

Review by bookpagedev

Take a look at Declan Hughes’ dark thriller, The Price of Blood. Ed Loy has been given one of the stranger assignments of his career: a missing persons case in which the only piece of information he has to work with is the name of the missing person; no dates, no workplace, no family, simply a name – Patrick Hutton. And finding one particular Patrick Hutton in Ireland is akin to finding, say, one particular Jim Anderson in the U.S. Still, the payday is welcome, and the client impeccable: a dying Catholic priest. Nonetheless, Loy begins to question his assignment (and perhaps his sanity with regard to staying on the job) as the bodies pile up in unlikely places. Loy is an exceptionally well-drawn character, strong but not unnecessarily violent, introspective without being angst-ridden. The dialogue is spare and edgy, the pacing crisp; Hughes’ sense of local color, and particularly his ability to impart it to his readers, is absolutely spot on.

(This review originally appeared in our March 2008 issue.)

Take a look at Declan Hughes' dark thriller, The Price of Blood. Ed Loy has been given one of the stranger assignments of his career: a missing persons case in which the only piece of information he has to work with is the name of…

Fiction

Bending the rules to play the game of love

Review by bookpagedev

In Kissing Games of the World, single mother Jamie McClintock has neither the desire nor the time for romance. After all, motherhood under the best of circumstances can be overwhelming, and for novelist Sandi Kahn Shelton’s latest heroine, an already precarious life caring for her asthmatic son and struggling to pay the bills is thrown off – kilter by the sudden death of her beloved elderly landlord.

When the late landlord’s estranged son Nate arrives in town to settle his father’s affairs, Jamie discovers that the spirited old gentleman devoted to raising his young grandson was actually a philandering, deadbeat dad in his day. At least, according to Nate, a widower whose late wife’s accident left him bereft and entirely incapable of caring for the boy. Now, Nate is reeling from the loss of a father whose transgressions he never forgave, and terrified by the prospect of raising a son he barely knows.

In Shelton’s capable literary hands, this is not merely a romantic tale, but also a credible story of a man determined not to let his family’s grim history repeat itself. Nate is charming and charismatic, but he can be pathologically insensitive and self – absorbed, too. And Jamie – an artist, whom Nate at first mistakenly assumes was one of his dad’s lovers – is not just another pretty face to be seduced and promptly discarded.

Of course, it’s not long before Jamie’s defensive self – preservation and Nate’s blustery bravado crumble under the laws of attraction. Nonetheless, passion is not enough to mend a pair of broken hearts suffering from major trust issues. Shelton’s greatest talent is a gift for juxtaposing comedy and tragedy to the pulsing beat of the modern – day mating dance. One moment the reader is laughing out loud at Nate’s unconventional parenting practices, and seconds later, nearly weeping as Jamie searches frantically for an asthma inhaler that can save her wheezing son’s life.

As the novel reaches its denouement, Jamie and Nate will seem like old friends, beloved despite, or maybe because of, their idiosyncratic personalities. Kissing games, like literature, rely on rules that are meant to be bent but not broken. The same holds true for Shelton’s novel, which allows a hopeful ending to unfold gracefully.

Karen Ann Cullotta writes from Arlington Heights, Illinois.

This review refers to the hardcover edition.

In Kissing Games of the World, single mother Jamie McClintock has neither the desire nor the time for romance. After all, motherhood under the best of circumstances can be overwhelming, and for novelist Sandi Kahn Shelton's latest heroine, an already precarious life caring for her…

FictionWomen's Fiction

Mission is love in Johnson’s latest romp

Review by bookpagedev

Spying is a complicated business, and that’s not even counting the spying part. The intelligence acronyms are hard enough to keep straight (FI, CI, HUMINT, COMMI). Besides that, there are "covert, overt, clandestine, and paramilitary" categories of each. Lulu is FI/HUMINT/NOC, and lower echelon enough to find human intelligence "an oxymoron."

However, she’s pleased to discover official duties and her romantic inclinations mesh when she is assigned to Morocco. It’s a "basic mission" to update the database with a long-term goal of battling extremist Muslim groups. The best part of the assignment is that it will enable her to rekindle her "little love affair with Ian Drumm," with whom she had worked in international aid in Kosovo.

Ian, who runs a luxurious haven for expatriate Europeans and Americans in Marrakech, warmly welcomes her reappearance, but seems preoccupied. In the process of identifying several citizens who are not what they appear to be, Lulu also finds herself in a subtle tug-of-war for Ian’s attentions.

Lulu in Marrakech is espionage light, but Diane Johnson is practiced at balancing the knotty questions of varying cultural constraints against self-centered, yet often freedom-based, Western values. Lulu’s interactions with a suspicious Saudi couple, an American gay twosome with a child, a Moroccan colonel, a girl in danger of being killed by her brother, and a number of other citizens along the way embroil her in a dubious development where life turns serious and the truth is hard to read.

Johnson, author of 14 previous books, has been a finalist several times for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Her latest novel is consistently absorbing, though plagued by an unresolved ambivalence, which probably reflects the nature of the subject itself. Readers might find themselves wondering at the end why anyone would want to be a spy, though the intermittent excitement probably makes up for other shortfalls. One thing’s for sure—Lulu would testify to it—if you want to be a really good spy, don’t fall in love.

Spying is a complicated business, and that's not even counting the spying part. The intelligence acronyms are hard enough to keep straight (FI, CI, HUMINT, COMMI). Besides that, there are "covert, overt, clandestine, and paramilitary" categories of each. Lulu is FI/HUMINT/NOC, and lower echelon enough…

Fiction

The bonds of marriage and sisterhood

Review by bookpagedev

Sisters & Husbands, the long-awaited sequel to Sisters & Lovers, opens with our heroine getting cold feet the day before her wedding. Beverly Jordan’s problem isn’t with her fiancé, Julian, a smart, loving, computer animator with whom she’s deeply in love. The reason for her skittishness is the apparent collapse of her sisters’ marriages, especially that of her older sister Evelyn, whose long marriage to Kevin has inexplicably gone south. Beverly’s other sister, Charmaine, is in such a power struggle with her spoiled stepdaughter over the attentions of her husband, Tyrone, that their marriage, too, is shaky. With role models like these, one shouldn’t be surprised if the cold feet of a woman hours away from her wedding turn to blocks of ice.

Despite all the angst, Connie Briscoe writes with good humor, a lightness of touch and, best of all, a deep understanding of her characters; and it doesn’t hurt that there’s a delicious, jaw-dropping twist about half way through the novel. The sisters are good women, kind, sensible and empathetic, though Briscoe doesn’t hesitate to show their flaws. Beverly can be gullible; Evelyn, who likes to show off her affluence with things like Fendi handbags, has taken her marriage for granted; and Charmaine can be catty, though her compassion for her stepdaughter, husband, and son is what allows them to hang together as a family. The sisters aren’t above sniping at each other, though their bond, in the end, is unbreakable. Briscoe surrounds them with equally believable characters that the reader grows to care for—with the exception of one miscreant who turns out to be dispensable anyway. The Jordan sisters’ parents are solid and hardworking and their kids are smart and well-behaved even through all the trauma. Though Charmaine and Evelyn’s husbands are exasperating, they, too, have their reasons: Kevin’s going through one of those midlife crises, and Tyrone is guilt-ridden over his divorce from his daughter’s mother and the fact that he doesn’t see her that often.

Sisters & Husbands celebrates the sometimes-overstretched ties of modern family life.

Arlene McKanic is a freelance writer who lives in Jamaica, New York.

Sisters & Husbands, the long-awaited sequel to Sisters & Lovers, opens with our heroine getting cold feet the day before her wedding. Beverly Jordan’s problem isn’t with her fiancé, Julian, a smart, loving, computer animator with whom she’s deeply in love. The reason for her…

Book clubs for the Hollywood elite

Review by bookpagedev

The first novel by Chandler Burr, New York Times perfume critic and the author of three books of nonfiction, is bound to generate chatter—not only because it features cameos by practically everyone in the New York publishing world (from David Remnick to Claudia Roth Pierpont) and several from Hollywood (Bryan Singer), but also because of the delicate subject at the center of its plot. Narrator Anne Rosenbaum is an immediately fascinating character, sharp-tongued and well read. She’s an Englishwoman happily married to a Jewish studio executive, Howard Rosenbaum. Anne is mostly isolated from the film world until, one day, someone in the industry asks her to compile a reading list. As things do in Hollywood, this catches on, and soon Anne is leading book clubs of directors and screenwriters from her back garden. Variety profiles her; “Talk of the Town” chimes in, too.

Anne’s unlikely rise to fame drives the book, and Burr has loads of fun with it. The first half of the novel is fast, witty and often hilarious, filled with delight in the power of language. There’s a wonderful dinner-table treatise on the lack of a comma between independent clauses in an article in The New Yorker; these things matter to Anne, and because of that, they begin to matter to others.

What jams up the gears is something that happens when Anne and Howard’s teenage son, Sam, takes a two-week trip to Israel. Anne isn’t Jewish, and so according to Israel neither is Sam; his rejection from a yeshiva throws Howard unexpectedly into crisis. Racial and religious identity, once peripheral, becomes a direct threat to Anne’s marriage. As her husband pulls away, Anne uses the massive and efficient Hollywood gossip machine to communicate with him through the book clubs. Toward the end of the novel, Anne (and hence the story) gets bogged down in argument, and the humor of the first half shifts toward poignancy. But it’s a gentle shift, not jarring, and it serves to underscore Burr’s point: that ideas have more power over our lives than we realize, and that literature is our best hope for finding our way.

Becky Ohlsen is a freelance writer in Portland, Oregon.

 

The first novel by Chandler Burr, New York Times perfume critic and the author of three books of nonfiction, is bound to generate chatter—not only because it features cameos by practically everyone in the New York publishing world (from David Remnick to Claudia Roth Pierpont)…

FictionShort Stories

Rick Bass makes his mark on American short fiction

Review by bookpagedev

There is a hot new name in American short fiction in 1989 and it is Rick Bass. With his fiction debut, The Watch, Bass offers a first-rate collection of ten stories that brings fresh imagination, excitement and promise. stories from this collection have won inclusion in various "year’s best" anthologies, and in my opinion rank at the very top of this year’s short fiction.

Even his personal story ignites imagination: he quit a career in geology about five years ago and, lacking funds for a formal education, taugh thimself to write. A Southerner with roots in Texas and Mississippi, he is now a caretaker for a ranch in Montana and well on his way to a successful literary career. How many of us harbor the desire, sometimes secret, sometimes not, for such a dramatic and romantic leap into the writing world. But he did it; he took the risk, took the painful cut in material living standard; and it has paid the dividend of this new book.

Bass’s southern background shows in the settings, moods and characters: most stories are set in Texas and Mississippi, with the balance in Montana and Utah. Nature is prominent in the stories, and most are grounded in the outdoors. His experience in and affection for the outdoors shine through like a sunrise in the bayou. these are classic stories of initiation, change, freedom, bondage, madness, guilt, love, trouble. He delivers, without dialect, in the straightforward and unadorned style which is a modern hallmark, but his stories have a greater vitality, passion and sense of joy and humor than in, say, the minimalist mode of other noted contemporary short fiction writers.

A dominating aspect is Bass’s use of surprise. Frequently, this flows from the idisyncracies of offbeat characters or their unexpected actions. It gives a stimulation and a sense of anticipation to ehs tories: you’re never quite certain what surprise the next paragraph may bring. Yet, Bass makes us accept even the most bizarre of characters or circumstances as believable. Consider "The Watch," the title story, which may be America’s best story of the past year: A 77-year old man, Buzbee, and his 63-year old son, Hollingsworth, live together in a remote grocery deep in the bayou country. The store has no customers, and its shelves are stacked with ancient and rusting tins. (The men have supported themselves by selling off their land to timber cutters.) Buzbee runs away and lives like a wild animal in a deserted yellow fever community. He entices black women, who have been abused by their men, to join him at his primitive camp. Buzbee keeps them naked and feeds them alligators and catfish he catches by handf rom the bayou and strings up in trees at the camp. He has regained his virility. Hollingsworth publishes a $1,000 reward for his missing father and persuades a man, who happens by the store, to join him in a mad and obsessed attempt to capture Buzbee.

In "Juggernat," Bass surprises te readers with the identity of a masked semi-pro hockey player in Houston who, after scoring goals, beats his chest and bellows, "I am in LOVE." Bass even surprised himself with that line. He said in an interview on NPR: "I couldn’t believe that line; I just laughed when I wrote it."

In "Mexico," Kirby and his wife, Tricia, a young couple who’ve been handed oil wealth by a relative, have built a swimming pool in their front yard and dumped an old VW in it as a habitat for their pet fish, a bass named Shack.

Rick Bass is a storyteller in the southern tradition, with an eye for colorful and imaginative characters, but he has a contemporary voice and style. No doubt, that combination will gather national recognition. Read this book for reat fun and entertainment and to see the emergence of a bright new talent.

There is a hot new name in American short fiction in 1989 and it is Rick Bass. With his fiction debut, The Watch, Bass offers a first-rate collection of ten stories that brings fresh imagination, excitement and promise. stories from this collection have won inclusion…

HistoryAmerican History

A year in the life of Henry Kissinger

Review by bookpagedev

Some passions die hard. If you’re old enough to recognize the names Le Duc Tho, Salvador Allende and Anatoly Dobrynin without resorting to Wikipedia, you already know what you think of Henry Kissinger. But younger people have no such preconceptions—and the passage of 35 years is probably long enough to open even most older minds about the man who dominated U.S. diplomacy in the early 1970s.

Alistair Horne, a veteran historian whose more recent works have focused on France, believes we’re now at a point when Kissinger’s record can be seen more objectively. Horne has known Kissinger since 1980, and the former secretary of state approached him in 2004 to write his official life. Horne counter-offered: thus, Kissinger: 1973, The Crucial Year.

Like other “years” that have recently attracted writers (1848 springs to mind), 1973 was indeed a doozy. Detente with the Soviet Union and China was in full swing. The U.S. and North Vietnam agreed to a treaty that ended direct American involvement in the Vietnam War, leading to a Nobel Peace Prize for Kissinger and Le Duc Tho. Chilean President Allende was overthrown in a military coup. The Yom Kippur War and subsequent oil embargo began a new era in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Overshadowing everything at home was the Watergate crisis, which both empowered and stymied Kissinger. He was promoted from national security advisor to secretary of state at a time when Nixon, a foreign policy strategic master prone to jealousy of his underling, was in political and personal collapse.

As Horne makes clear, Kissinger was a product of the Cold War generation, and he saw literally every issue through the prism of relations with the Soviets. He failed again and again to heed warnings that Egypt was about to attack Israel, and he initially underestimated President Anwar Sadat’s abilities. But he quickly seized the opportunity to push the Soviets out of the Middle East and make the U.S. the key mediator in the conflict, with mixed consequences that persist today.

Vietnam emerges as Kissinger’s worst failure, though only in part through his own actions. Horne argues that Watergate’s most serious foreign policy impact was to limit the U.S. ability to respond to flagrant North Vietnamese treaty violations, as a Congress hostile to Nixon refused military funding.

If a book on foreign affairs can have lighter moments, they come in Horne’s description of Kissinger’s calamitous “Year of Europe” initiative, which ran aground on British pique, French obstructionism and German Ostpolitik. More seriously, the latest evidence described by Horne suggests that the decision by Kissinger and his top colleagues to respond to what they saw as a Soviet provocation in the Middle East with a DEFCON 3 alert of the U.S. military was an overreaction—the most dangerous point in the Cold War since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Although Horne is an authorized biographer with full access to Kissinger and his voluminous archives, he is not a hagiographer. He scrupulously goes through the arguments of Kissinger’s critics on the left and the right, and examines the evidence, including newly available Soviet records. He comes to a generally favorable conclusion, but provides readers with enough facts and fair analysis to make up their own minds.

Anne Bartlett is a journalist in Washington, D.C.
 

Some passions die hard. If you’re old enough to recognize the names Le Duc Tho, Salvador Allende and Anatoly Dobrynin without resorting to Wikipedia, you already know what you think of Henry Kissinger. But younger people have no such preconceptions—and the passage of 35 years…

FictionHorror

Anne Rice’s latest Vampire Chronicles installment is a bloody good time

Review by bookpagedev

In one of the most famous cases of man-on-the-street criticism, a London cabby once told Sir Arthur Conan Doyle that, while Sherlock Holmes might not have died when he went over the Reichenbach Falls, "he was never the same man after."

Well, the Vampire Lestat has by definition not died, but he isn’t the same intellectually seductive specter either. To use the rock metaphor he chose for himself last time around, Un-Death has lost its Sting.

In The Queen of the Damned, the third of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, (another is already in the works), Lestat has lost the sensual, restless rebelliousness that drove him to upend the vampire establishment and acquire a shallow, me-first arrogance.

Instead of struggling to liberate mankind by becoming a sex-symbol of evil, Lestat is just addicted to the spotlight. "I’m the Vampire Lestat. Remember me? The vampire who became a super rock star, the one who wrote the autobiography?" Maybe he’s just exchanged a Sixties sensibility for the Eighties, and maybe that’s part of Rice’s concept; but Lestat is a lot less sympathetic monster this way—and that’s the hook, after all.

Psychologically speaking, Rice has changed vampires in the middle of the stream-of-consciousness. Vampires are, of course, about sex: about women submitting to the intimate exchange of, literally, the life-giving liquid—and coming to enjoy it. (This "little death," as the French call orgasm, is for real.) And sexual metaphors, like sexual mores, change with time. While the women victims of Bram Stoker’s Victorian-era Dracula and his descendants merely succumbed to his rather pointed advances, the modern vampire’s mate, like several of Rice’s female characters (and, among others, the headstrong Kate Nelligan in the 1979 remake of Dracula) meets her remaker on equal terms.

But in Queen of the Damned, the feminist, equality theme goes radical, with a millennium-old vampire—in fact, the first vampire, the very Eve of her kind—who reemerges as the fury whom Hell hath no scorn like. she intends to redress the exhaustive violence done to women by men throughout history by an even more pervasive violence, eliminating all but a handful of men needed to perpetuate the human species. And to accomplish this, she not only destroys the men wtih a mental firepower Rice describes with a chilling force, she incites the women who witness her visitations to kill as well, thus reducing the women to the same level of monstrosity as their traditional opressors, though that doesn’t seem to occur to anyone.

The Queen’s reign of terror brings together a mini-coven of the last, the older and most powerful vampires (in her perverse jihad, the Queen has psychically immolated most of the others). The final confrontation between the Queen and her variously philosophical rivals unfortunately settles into a pompous discourse of the human species’ right of self-determination, the role of religion (the Queen is variously confused with Iris, the Virgin Mary, the White Goddess, etc.) and the problematical advances or technology…and the psychological and physical power of a vampire eucharist.

There are conveniences of plot that Lestat readers will stumble over. The Queen has been awakened from her nearly-eternal sleep by a blodd-sharing—the vampire "kiss—from the ever-presumptuous Lestat, and takes him for her somewhat submissive lover. For her sake, the previously particular and often regretful Lestat becomes a killing machine.

There are mechanical problems with this story, too; multiple narrators, not all of whom have their own voices; and a self-consciousness that threatens to pull the supernatural rug right out from under Rice.

Still, Rice’s books just won’t give up the ghose. The spell from Vampire Lestat and Interview with the Vampire is easily strong enough to pull the reader through the rough spots—and besides, there’s always another installment to look forward to.

In one of the most famous cases of man-on-the-street criticism, a London cabby once told Sir Arthur Conan Doyle that, while Sherlock Holmes might not have died when he went over the Reichenbach Falls, "he was never the same man after."

Well, the Vampire Lestat…

Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

A dark coming-of-age story

Review by bookpagedev

When it comes to selecting their next read, lovers of literature are familiar with the adage “don’t judge a book by its cover.” Whether most people actually subscribe to this rule is debatable, but the advice is particularly sage when considering English author R.J. Ellory’s A Quiet Belief in Angels. The bold cover evokes authors like James Patterson, and it would be all too easy to dismiss Ellory’s American debut as a cookie-cutter thriller. To do so would be a shame for both fans and non-fans of the crime thriller genre.

Given the basic premise of the novel, it’s not hard to see why A Quiet Belief in Angels is billed as a literary thriller. Growing up in small-town Georgia, Joseph Vaughan knows only a hard life that is mired in tragedy and horror. The days of his youth are forever tainted by a series of brutal murders targeting young girls, shaking the bedrock of his sleepy town and forcing Joseph to grow up faster than seems fair. As all that he holds dear is slowly stripped away, Joseph decides to leave his hometown and head north to pursue his dream of becoming an author—only to find that the atrocities from his past will not be so easily left behind.

While the mystery behind the mounting body count might motivate many readers to stick with this novel, the story has a rather leisurely pace, which might make “thriller” seem like a misnomer here. The murders never feel as though they are the central conceit of the novel, with the real focus instead being Joseph’s transition from boy to man; A Quiet Belief in Angels reads more as a dark coming-of-age tale rather than a traditional crime novel. But don’t consider this a weakness—Ellory’s writing is so lyrical, powerful and heartrending that those who normally steer clear of the genre are likely to feel at home. A Quiet Belief in Angels has already gained Ellory international acclaim, and while Americans may be a bit late to the party, another saying once more proves true: better late than never.

Stephenie Harrison writes from Nashville.
 

When it comes to selecting their next read, lovers of literature are familiar with the adage “don’t judge a book by its cover.” Whether most people actually subscribe to this rule is debatable, but the advice is particularly sage when considering English author R.J. Ellory’s…

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