bookpagedev

LifestylesHealth & Fitness

See how he ran

Review by bookpagedev

Dean Karnazes loves to run . . . and run . . . and run. In fact, the 26.2-mile marathons that represent the pinnacle of athletic achievement for many runners are for Karnazes a typical weekend workout. (Those curious about how he fits all that mileage into a busy life might want to read his first book, the best-selling Ultramarathon Man: Confessions of an All-Night Runner.) In 2006, Karnazes took those workouts to an unprecedented, astonishing level via the Endurance 50. 50/50: Secrets I Learned Running 50 Marathons in 50 Days – and How You Too Can Achieve Super Endurance!, written with Matt Fitzgerald, is Karnazes’ recounting of the experience, plus training tips, nutrition advice and encouragement for athletes of all ability levels.

Karnazes writes that he is always seeking new challenges or, more specifically, “epic tests of endurance that sound totally impossible.” The idea for this latest endeavor popped into his head on a family vacation that, like many Karnazes family outings, included a road trip in a 27-foot RV and a long runs for the author. Three years later, in partnership with sponsor The North Face, a sports-centric retailer, it was a go: a road- and running-trip on a grand scale. The event consisted of 50 certified marathons of all types (pavement, trails, high elevation) and sizes (Karnazes ran with 38,000 runners in New York City, and just one in South Dakota) in each of the 50 states. He writes honestly about the delight and thankfulness he felt upon meeting the people who took the time to run with him – including then-governor Mike Huckabee – and about his frustrations and missteps, too.

The book includes detailed training schedules for runners interested in following in the author’s multimarathon footsteps, plus a plan for runners aiming for their very first marathon. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of 50/50, though, is that rare peek into the mindset and motivation of an extreme athlete . . . and wondering, along with him, what’s next.

Linda M. Castellitto writes (sometimes at her treadmill desk) from North Carolina.

Dean Karnazes loves to run . . . and run . . . and run. In fact, the 26.2-mile marathons that represent the pinnacle of athletic achievement for many runners are for Karnazes a typical weekend workout. (Those curious about how he fits all that…
Memoir

Longtime JFK aide Sorensen recalls his life in the West Wing

Review by bookpagedev

Forty-five years after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Ted Sorensen’s adoration of his old boss shines as brightly in Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History as it did when the two men were laying the foundation for what came to be known as “The New Frontier.” Kennedy hired Sorensen as his legislative assistant in 1953 shortly after being elected to the Senate and kept him on at increasing levels of responsibility throughout his presidency.

It was a strange pairing from the start. Kennedy was a Massachusetts-born, Harvard-educated, Catholic war hero with fairly conservative leanings, while Sorensen was a politically progressive Nebraska native of Danish and Russian Jewish origin, a Unitarian and a registered conscientious objector. Still, they hit it off immediately. Sorensen found in Kennedy the makings of an idealist, someone who had the industry, intelligence, good will and charisma to fulfill Sorensen’s own liberal political values. Both had a rich sense of humor.

While conceding that Kennedy was unfaithful in his marriage, Sorensen does little more than nod toward that subject. In his eyes, Kennedy’s weaknesses were trivial compared to the good he achieved as president in furthering civil rights, orchestrating the removal of Russian missiles from Cuba without going to war, lobbying for nuclear disarmament and putting America on the road to pre-eminence in space exploration. He dutifully notes his superior’s flaws, such as failing to censure Joseph McCarthy and being a latecomer to the civil rights cause, but he clearly considers these as aberrations in an otherwise noble personality.

A year after joining Kennedy’s staff, Sorensen began writing speeches for him and remained his chief scribe from that point on. Without discounting his own considerable input, he does deny the still pervasive rumor that he wrote Kennedy’s best-selling 1956 book, Profiles in Courage. He credits the senator with conceiving the idea, masterminding the research and doing much of the writing and editing. Profiles was such a success that instead of assigning Sorensen half of its income, as he had done for articles his assistant had ghosted in his name, Kennedy paid him a large flat fee, the amount of which the usually candid author chooses not to disclose.

Sorensen’s descriptions of his companionship with Kennedy, both in his office and on the interminable campaign tours, are charming glimpses into the ways politics used to be done – before the proliferation of pollsters, media advisors, opposition researchers and frenzied fundraising schemes. (Kennedy, of course, was amply funded by his father.) Always at his boss’ elbow – a factor, he admits, that hastened the breakup of his first marriage – Sorensen explains the various strategies that ultimately calmed the electorate’s fear of Kennedy’s Catholicism. It boiled down to the youthful-looking senator convincing voters that he truly believed in the separation of church and state. Sorensen observes that all the fears of religious dominance conservative Protestants then voiced against Kennedy have now been fulfilled by a Protestant president.

Counselor is one of the most readable political memoirs one could hope for. While not as breezy and gossipy as Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s Journals, it does convey the intensity, excitement and joy of those who believe that government, properly inspired and executed, can be a great force for good.

Edward Morris watches politics from Nashville.

Forty-five years after John F. Kennedy's assassination, Ted Sorensen's adoration of his old boss shines as brightly in Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History as it did when the two men were laying the foundation for what came to be known as "The…
NonfictionTrue Crime

Old scores, new playing fields

Review by bookpagedev

Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko died slowly, painfully and publicly in hisadopted home city of London. Stricken on November 1, 2006, by a sudden and mysterious ailment, he lingered for 22 days, confounding an array of top physicians, before his body finally wasted away. Investigators ultimately discovered that he had ingested a lethal dose of the rare radioactive element Polonium 210.

As soon as he realized he had been poisoned, the former KGB (and subsequently FSB) intelligence agent blamed the attack on Russian President and fellow KGB alumnus Vladimir Putin – a charge Putin brushed aside with contempt. Nevertheless, the assassination set off diplomatic fireworks between Downing Street and the Kremlin that continue to reverberate. In The Terminal Spy, Alan S. Cowell provides brief histories of all the major players (most via personal interviews), including the chief suspected assassin, Andrei Lugovoi; and fugitive billionaire Boris Berezovsky, who became Litvinenko’s patron in London and who had earlier engineered Litvinenko’s only face-to-face meeting with Putin soon after Putin became head of the FSB in 1998.

Although Litvinenko was clearly a bit player in the grand clash between Putin’s and Berezovsky’s views of how Russia should operate, he courted direct retaliation not only by fleeing from his homeland illegally but also by persisting to rail against Putin and his policies throughout his five-plus years in England. Even in death, Cowell says, Litvinenko remains a mystery. He notes that those who knew the victim agree that “[h]e was a zealot. He was flaky. He saw connections where no one else did. He was obsessive. But they will also say he was a professional, an investigator, well practiced in the dark arts of his business.” Cowell, a former London bureau chief for the New York Times, makes no judgment of his own here as to who killed Litvinenko or why, but he does go a long way toward clarifying why the fall of Soviet communism and the upsurge of unbridled Russian capitalism created such social, economic and political havoc.

Edward Morris writes from Nashville.

Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko died slowly, painfully and publicly in hisadopted home city of London. Stricken on November 1, 2006, by a sudden and mysterious ailment, he lingered for 22 days, confounding an array of top physicians, before his body finally wasted away. Investigators ultimately…
Biography

As alike as chalk and cheese

Review by bookpagedev

The writings of George Orwell (Animal Farm) and Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited) engaged and electrified international audiences in the first half of the 20th century. In that, these British literary lions – each with decidedly different lifestyles – are similar. Writer David Lebedoff (Cleaning Up) uncovers deeper similarities in The Same Man: George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in Love and War, a refreshing dual biography that compares and contrasts the lives and works of these authors, both of whom held the same (dim) views of totalitarianism, morality and the future of our modern world.

At a glance, the lives of George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh seem no more alike than chalk is to cheese. Though both were born in 1903 England into the same social class, their paths diverged as they were educated, grew to manhood against a background of world war, and pursued their literary callings (meeting only once). During his boarding school days, the sensitive Orwell was cruelly bullied (torture he later chronicled in the essay “Such, Such Were the Joys”). Waugh had a brash lineage (his grandfather’s nickname was “The Brute”), and was a schoolboy bully who would later habitually torment both friend and foe alike. Orwell, a socialist and atheist, chose a hard life of near poverty. Waugh, a conservative and an ardent Catholic convert, was an unabashed social climber who courted the moneyed, aristocratic echelons of British society. Waugh lived into his 60s, gaining early success as a writer; Orwell’s writings remained fairly obscure until shortly before his death at age 46.

The conceit of examining opposites to excavate similarities has driven many classic tales, and it is employed with deft honesty here, despite Lebedoff’s effusive fondness for these authors. The Same Man is a first-rate read, an adroit portrait of two prescient thinkers who feared, with the steady upward and so-called progress of the Modern Age, our collective fall into “a bottomless abyss.” Enlivened by Lebedoff’s trenchant observations of the authors’ inner and outer worlds, it is pulled down slightly by the final chapter, which strays occasionally into unfocused conjecture irrelevant to this biography’s worthy premise.

Alison Hood plans to re-read Animal Farm and Brideshead Revisited before summer’s end.

The writings of George Orwell (Animal Farm) and Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited) engaged and electrified international audiences in the first half of the 20th century. In that, these British literary lions - each with decidedly different lifestyles - are similar. Writer David Lebedoff (Cleaning Up)…
FictionHistorical Fiction

High seas adventure

Review by bookpagedev

Needlepoint, corsairs, Cornwall’s coast – such subjects and setting seem like an echo from the past. Yet in The Tenth Gift, Jane Johnson makes plot relevant and characters sparkle as contemporary heroine Julia Lovat flees from heartbreak and her historical counterpart Catherine Tregenna seethes in the hold of a vessel on pirate-infested seas. The dual stories dramatically alternate, with Johnson creating verisimilitude in both the 17th and the 21st centuries.

The storyline springs from rumors of a congregation kidnapped from a Cornwall church during a slave trader’s Sunday raid. As Johnson discovered while researching a family legend, the rumors were true. Few records remain of those English captives’ experiences in North Africa. Johnson recreates their ordeal through the observations of Catherine both as character and as a diarist, since Catherine’s journal has fallen into Julia’s hands as a farewell gift from her married boyfriend. Julia studies the archaic language and imagines Catherine’s plight, described in lines like these, written from the ship: “This verie mornyng old Mrs Ellys expired at last from weaknesse &andamp; shock of losyng her poor husbande, but no one has taken her bodie, she lyes in the ordure &andamp; addes to the stink.” To learn more about Catherine’s plight, Julia leaves London for Cornwall in a rush and then, even more impulsively, takes off for Rabat. Johnson’s storytelling skills are great. Almost 200 pages pass before either character gets to Morocco – Julia by air and Catherine in chains – and yet the stories of their daily lives enchant from page one.

Johnson, publishing director at HarperCollins UK, comes by her knowledge of Morocco honestly. She met and married a man on a trip to Morocco, and they now live part of the year in a Berber village. Her writing is mostly free of stereotypes. Even the archvillain Al-Andalusi, Catherine’s chief captor, exposes his softer side. His murderous passions spring from the Inquisition’s destruction of his own family.

The Tenth Gift explores love, forgiveness, work, captivity in its various forms and the meaning of life. Characters strive to build their faith whether they understand everything that happens to them or not. A based-on-true-life plot makes for a riveting tale, all the way to the improbable if emotionally satisfying ending.

Andrea Brunais writes from Tampa, Florida, and Bluefield, West Virginia.

Needlepoint, corsairs, Cornwall's coast - such subjects and setting seem like an echo from the past. Yet in The Tenth Gift, Jane Johnson makes plot relevant and characters sparkle as contemporary heroine Julia Lovat flees from heartbreak and her historical counterpart Catherine Tregenna seethes in…
Memoir

A reporter goes on the record

Review by bookpagedev

Given the recent run of memoirs whose astonishing exploits and lurid tales ended up being false, it’s not surprising journalist David Carr takes extraordinary steps to ensure the credibility of his own shocking new work, The Night of the Gun. The book vividly details the New York Times media and business columnist’s descent into drug addiction and the battle to recover from both that sickness and cancer. It also documents his fight to gain custody of his children, and his subsequent struggles as a parent.

Carr videotaped more than 60 interviews, and used both legal and medical records while employing a writing style that is far more essay/documentary than literary. He’s not trying to wow or shock but rather to inform and warn, yet he injects enough humor and irony into his tale to keep the account from becoming overly detached. He also includes numerous ugly, unflattering revelations.

One example is the night a longtime friend finally pulls a gun on Carr, insisting he leave or get shot. In another section, Carr discusses his attempt to become a cocaine dealer. Both these segments and others show Carr hasn’t sanitized his account, that he truly wants readers to understand how bad his life was during this period of more than three years.

But Carr’s story doesn’t neatly end: though he overcame his dependence on crack, he eventually had problems with alcohol. Nearly 14 years later, he was arrested twice more, and even spent a night in jail wearing a tuxedo, a bizarre situation that only compounded his anger and guilt over being in trouble once again. Carr finally understands that despite his love for his family, he’s capable of slipping at any time – that knowledge accompanies everything he’ll do the rest of his life.

The Night of the Gun brilliantly blends commentary, reflection, reporting, philosophy and outrage. It’s among the most incisive, amazing and poignant memoirs you’ll encounter, even if, as Carr himself says, you can’t be certain every single word is true.

Ron Wynn writes for Nashville City Paper and other publications.

Given the recent run of memoirs whose astonishing exploits and lurid tales ended up being false, it's not surprising journalist David Carr takes extraordinary steps to ensure the credibility of his own shocking new work, The Night of the Gun. The book vividly details the…
Fiction

Yankee Doodle doo-doo

Review by bookpagedev

In his third book, Joey Goebel, author of Torture the Artist and The Anomalies, holds a funhouse mirror up to our national family’s biennial reunion (aka congressional elections), framed in the microcosm of the Mapother clan, one of America’s wealthiest – and most dysfunctional – dynasties.

The story begins with an apocalyptic vision, when a seriously over-wound religious socialite sees her eldest son John as an instrument of divine intervention and persuades him to run for Congress to fulfill her prophecy. However, it seems that being the scion of America’s elite has driven a wedge between the candidate and the common man, and the Mapother clan believes John’s estranged brother Eugene “Blue Gene” Mapother, a mullet-wearin’, trailer park-livin’, Parliament-smokin’ ex-Wal-Mart employee, can put them in touch with the masses (and more importantly, deliver their vote).

It all starts to unravel when Blue Gene falls for a pinko punk rocker going by the name of Jackie Stepchild, who is nobody’s fool, and nobody’s tool. Inflamed by the Mapother family hijinks, she turns brother against brother, mounting her own populist candidacy as the standard bearer for the newly formed Have-Not Party. Against the backdrop of that congressional campaign, not to mention our own, Stepchild’s rhetoric rings out with refreshingly spin-free clarity: “I agree that the United States is the greatest nation on Earth, but I also believe that it is the nation that has failed the most in living up to its own potential. Please write me in as your choice for Congress so that I might distract that almighty superpower from her incessant coddling of the rich and hold her attention for at least just a moment in order to say, psst. Hey. Come here. There are some people who I’d like you to meet who need you much, much worse.” Red state or blue, bleeding heart liberal or hawk-taloned conservative, Commonwealth will make you laugh, it’ll make you scowl, but most importantly, it’ll make you think.

Thane Tierney lives in Los Angeles, many miles from our nation’s capital.

In his third book, Joey Goebel, author of Torture the Artist and The Anomalies, holds a funhouse mirror up to our national family's biennial reunion (aka congressional elections), framed in the microcosm of the Mapother clan, one of America's wealthiest - and most dysfunctional -…
FictionShort Stories

Standing ovation for first collection

Review by bookpagedev

The single-author short story collection has its devoted fans. But The Boat – the first collection from Nam Le, who has established himself in the short fiction genre in venues like One Story and Zoetrope – is so engaging, so unequivocally well done, that it’s sure to appeal to any fan of good writing.

From the opening tale of The Boat, it’s hard not to be giddy: Wait, was that a brilliantly self-conscious and humorous slice of the writing life, which doubled as a poignant story about fathers and sons and family tragedies? Yes. Yes, it was. Things only get better from there. Nam Le is a chameleon of voices and points of view, leading the reader through the experiences of an older man, a disillusioned young woman, a boy on the cusp of adulthood, a teenage girl. The Boat takes us all over the world with fantastic verisimilitude.

“Tehran Calling” is the story of an American woman’s attempt to understand life while visiting a friend in Iran, while “Cartagena” is a sobering sketch of a teenage hit man in Colombia. “Halflead Bay” is an enviable achievement – an adolescent’s battle to find courage as his life begins to turn upside down, the story developed with perfect suspense. The vaguely panicked “Hiroshima” follows two girls trying to conduct life just before the bomb is dropped, and the title story offers urgency, poignancy and heartbreaking tragedy.

As if the stories themselves weren’t enough to make The Boat a worthy summer read, the skill of the author is a spectacle to behold. He manages to avoid so many pitfalls. He doesn’t shy away from stark and disturbing images, for example, yet he doesn’t rely on the grotesque to create effective writing. The reader can sense his personal investment in his work, but the stories aren’t even close to self-indulgent. It’s enough to give a person a literary crush.

Each story is dark and deep, exquisitely constructed and beautifully told. Nam Le is a studied, competent and graceful writer, and The Boat is both a contemporary treasure and a harbinger of good things to come.

Jessica Inman writes from Tulsa, Oklahoma.

The single-author short story collection has its devoted fans. But The Boat - the first collection from Nam Le, who has established himself in the short fiction genre in venues like One Story and Zoetrope - is so engaging, so unequivocally well done, that it's…
FictionHistorical Fiction

Through catastrophe, redemption

Review by bookpagedev

One of the lesser-known horrors of war is the way it can pervert human relationships and loyalties, whether between parents and children, teachers and students, or friends. In Tan Twan Eng’s amazing debut novel, which was long-listed for the 2007 Man Booker Prize, we’re presented with societies whose sense of loyalty, duty and honor are already intense, and easily twisted by the depravities of World War II.

The protagonist of The Gift of Rain is Philip Hutton, the youngest child of a British planter and his young Chinese wife, who, like Eng, was born and raised in Penang, off the coast of Malaysia, then called Malaya. The story is told inretrospect when Philip is an old man, and his memories of his beloved martial arts teacher Hayato Endo have been revived by the arrival of an equally elderly lady who also once loved Endo-san, though chastely.

Because he is half Chinese and his half-siblings are fully British, the Philip we encounter as a boy is something of a loner. Then, when he’s 16, just before the start of the war, he meets a Japanese man on the beach who asks to borrow his boat. Philip not only loans the boat but becomes Endo-san’s pupil, though the relationship is disapproved of by Philip’s family and community; even before the war the Japanese aren’t trusted in Malaya. The effect pupil and teacher have on each other, and their societies, is incalculable, both catastrophic and redemptive by turns. Indeed, sometimes catastrophe and redemption are so intertwined that they can’t be untangled.

Eng’s writing is beautiful and sensuous, whether he describes a temple full of slithering snakes, the smells of cooking food or the light of hundreds of fireflies caught in mosquito netting. Interestingly, The Gift of Rain also shares many of the qualities of a boy’s adventure story. The most intense relationships are between men, there’s no sex and no swearing and there’s even a scene involving the threat of torture and a ticking time bomb that could have been plucked out of “24.” But these are in no way flaws. The Gift of Rain is a splendidly written tale about the consequences of war and friendship.

Arlene McKanic writes from Jamaica, New York.

One of the lesser-known horrors of war is the way it can pervert human relationships and loyalties, whether between parents and children, teachers and students, or friends. In Tan Twan Eng's amazing debut novel, which was long-listed for the 2007 Man Booker Prize, we're presented…
FictionHistorical Fiction

Trial by fire

Review by bookpagedev

The catastrophes that human beings can endure – genocide, holocaust, slavery – and not only live through but thrive in spite of, is one of the more impressive things about our species. In Breena Clarke’s latest novel, Stand the Storm, the Coats family, most of them born into slavery, prosper despite the odds against them in pre- and post-Civil War Washington, D.C.

The family matriarch is Annie, spared the most backbreaking aspects of slavery because of her genius at sewing. She passes on the skill to her adored son Gabriel and her somewhat less adored daughter Ellen. The family, with the grudging permission of their master, Jonathan Ridley, go into business in a Georgetown shop run by Ridley’s nephew Aaron. So feckless is Aaron that he largely leaves the Coatses alone to grow the business and practice their art – and sewing and embroidery are not only art forms, but the way Gabriel purchases his family’s freedom.

Clarke excels in showing the ways the communities of both slave and freedmen communicated and helped each other – the way a curtain was knotted in a window, for example, could be a sign of safe passage. Her language is formal, which harkens back to the novels written during the period she covers, but her take on her characters is startlingly modern. Annie’s love for her son has something vaguely incestuous about it, enough for her to keep other men at bay. Gabriel, though upright and moral, has a hard side. He never quite warms to the mixed-race child his sister is forced to adopt to save what little reputation belongs to the child’s white mother. Jonathan Ridley is probably the most complex and sad of the characters. Though he’s always cared for Gabriel, he is, in the end, a monster. Still, the reader feels that his position in a society as warped and inhumane as the Southern slavocracy has made him so.

The book ends not with tragedy, exactly, but an act of such plain bad luck that it’s a perverse sort of triumph. What happens to the Coatses doesn’t happen because they’re black, and the victims of evil white agency, but because they’re human. Clarke celebrates that humanity in all its flawed beauty.

Arlene McKanic writes from South Carolina.

The catastrophes that human beings can endure - genocide, holocaust, slavery - and not only live through but thrive in spite of, is one of the more impressive things about our species. In Breena Clarke's latest novel, Stand the Storm, the Coats family, most of…
Food & DrinkCookbooks

A sweet, savory gastronomic trilogy

Review by bookpagedev

Celebrated American author M.F.

K. Fisher once said that when she wrote about food and eating, she was really speaking to our hunger for love and warmth. We humans are hungry, each with different longings we assuage according to our varied cultural roots. Come to sustain us through the winter are three savory volumes of food writing from a cornucopia of authors, including Fisher, that illuminate man’s culinary and agrarian traditions, creations, prejudices and cravings.

A memorable meal might offer superb dishes and exquisite vintages served in a delightful ambiance. Mark Kurlansky, author of The New York Times bestseller Cod, delivers just such a remarkable repast with his gastronomic anthology, Choice Cuts: A Savory Selection of Food Writing from Around the World and Throughout History. Literary writings from an eclectic company of authors focus on man’s knowledge and appreciation of food and drink through the ages. From Plato, Brillat-Savarin and Thoreau to Elizabeth David and Alice B. Toklas (who reveals the best way to clobber a carp), these “cuts” analyze culinary arts and exaggerations, degustation and man’s enduring desire for crispy pommes frites.

Kurlansky’s clear, well-researched introduction (a small history of food writing) and commentary enliven his selections, which are tucked into chapters on gluttony, food and sex, the primary food groups, culinary rants, food politics and the seductions of chocolate. Choice Cuts is an erudite treat containing practical instruction on preparing your Thanksgiving turkey, arcane lore on the aphrodisiacal properties of celery, and peculiar recipes, such as how to make your whole roasted cow look alive again. A book for culinary aficionados, Cuts casts a wide appeal as pure entertainment, especially when garnished with a comfortable armchair, favorite libation and a plate of chilled, crunchy celery at hand.

When French winemakers speak of terroir, they refer to a signature confluence of natural elements that distinguish one vineyard from another, helping to produce unique, legendary wines. This concept of distinction is no less evident when considering American Southern cuisine, which is bound intimately to its terrain and cultural diversity. The Southern way with food is feted in Corn Bread Nation 1: The Best of Southern Food Writing (University of North Carolina, $16.95, 304 pages, ISBN 0807854190), edited by John Egerton. Cornbread draws an endearing culinary portrait of the South, long renowned for its anomalies of habit and culture.

These collected essays from contemporary writers such as Rick Bragg, Roy Blount Jr., James Villas and others, are a celebration of Southern food, cooks and culinary traditions many of which have fallen prey to progress. Funny, perceptive, and wise, often a touch odd, these evocative writings are a paean to the vanishing South. There are not many men left like 96-year old Coe Dupuis, a Cajun moonshiner, who contributing writer Craig Laban calls the “wizard of whiskey, a Stravinsky at the still.” And it is hard to find a good batch of livermush, a fragrant mess o’ beans and hocks, or ambrosial ‘cue at just any corner cafŽ. These are special dishes of heredity, place and the sometimes strange finesse of Southern cooks.

Cornbread Nation, sponsored by the Southern Foodways Alliance, a Mississippi group dedicated to preserving Southern food culture, is not a definitive study of its subject, but provides a soulful, enlightening window on the terroir of Southern cuisine. With tributes to cooks Edna Lewis and Eugene Walter, debate on country- versus chicken-fried steak and a rhapsody to watermelon, even readers north of the Mason-Dixon Line will want to pull up a chair to the convivial Southern table.

Jeffrey Steingarten, indefatigable eater and food critic for Vogue, pulls no punches: He will go to the ends of the earth to debunk quackeries of taste and uphold gastronomic veracity. It Must’ve Been Something I Ate: The Return of the Man Who Ate Everything (Knopf, $27.50, 464 pages, ISBN 0375412808), a compilation of his essays for Vogue, chronicles Steingarten’s investigatory travels into the truth about how, why and what we humans eat.

Steingarten’s introduction, “The Way We Eat Now,” asserts that misguided attitudes toward food are at the root of global angst. He believes that bringing an open mind to the table can foster personal, and ultimately global, goodwill. The author’s culinary quest is often perilous: He takes a turbulent trip on a tuna boat in search of the elusive bluefin, endures a claustrophobic brain scan to prove that gourmandise is not caused by insidious brain lesions and suffers an overstuffed stomach searching out the last honest Parisian baguette.

These essays, a delight for discerning eaters, are lavished with Steingarten’s self-deprecating wit, obsessive doggedness and his devotion to “the elemental, primordial glee we feel every time we are called to dinner.” He preaches a simple gospel: Eat happily, be happy!

Celebrated American author M.F.

K. Fisher once said that when she wrote about food and eating, she was really speaking to our hunger for love and warmth. We humans are hungry, each with different longings we assuage according to our varied cultural roots. Come…
Fiction

Lucy in the sky with parrots

Review by bookpagedev

Pharmakon is a Greek word meaning both poison and cure. As the title of Dirk Wittenborn’s novel, the word not only defines the early days of prescribed mood-altering drugs, but also the difficulty of truly understanding the triumphs and tragedies of a family’s story.

The novel is narrated by Zach Friedrich, youngest son of William Friedrich, who, just after World War II, develops a scale of happiness that allows clinicians to rate whether a person is becoming more or less happy (and more or less sane). He goes on to create, with a Yale colleague, something he believes will be a cure for unhappiness, a pill derived from a New Guinea plant. When the trial ends in violence, the project is buried, William gets a job at Rutgers and Zach is born and grows up without knowing the secrets the family left behind.

Despite the heavy subject matter, including murder, mental illness, family secrets and betrayal, Pharmakon is actually quite funny – not surprising, given the author’s short stint on “Saturday Night Live.” Wittenborn is a witty and intelligent storyteller, and his own life story mirrors that of Zach’s: he’s a child born to a psychopharmacologist father who had a few disgruntled patients of his own.

Readers will have fun trying to decide which parts of the story are autobiographical (was there really a girl named Sunshine and a gaggle of parrots in the mulberry tree?) and which parts come from the author’s imagination. Either way, this is the kind of book one imagines college professors read on their summer vacations: one that is at once smart, darkly funny, entertaining and informational, told with love and an eye toward the bigger issue of how families endure both the poisons and the curatives of everyday life.

Sarah E. White writes from Arkansas.

Pharmakon is a Greek word meaning both poison and cure. As the title of Dirk Wittenborn's novel, the word not only defines the early days of prescribed mood-altering drugs, but also the difficulty of truly understanding the triumphs and tragedies of a family's story.
Fiction

A downward spiral, in love and war

Review by bookpagedev

Part of what was so amazing about James Meek’s highly praised previous novel, The People’s Act of Love, was that it successfully combined an ambitious novel of ideas with an epic historical thriller. Set in Siberia during the tumultuous aftermath of the Russian Revolution, that novel focused on a Czech regiment marooned in an unforgiving landscape among an ascetic Christian cult. Such was the dramatic power and expansive reach of the book that Meek was called by some critics Britain’s best Russian novelist.

Many of the qualities that animate his previous book – an edgy combination of narrative and ideas, a visceral understanding of conflict, a hunger for authentic belief – also power Meek’s new novel, We Are Now Beginning Our Descent. But the new book is quite different, and somewhat more uneven, than its predecessor.

Set in contemporary Afghanistan, London, Scotland, Virginia and Iraq, We Are Now Beginning Our Descent follows the decline and disintegration of Adam Kellas, a journalist and would-be popular novelist. Returning from a stint as a war correspondent in post-9/11 Afghanistan and disturbed both by what he has witnessed and by the failure of a brief affair with a mysterious American reporter named Astrid Glass, Kellas is consumed by a deeply conflicted self-righteousness. It seeps into the potboiler he is trying to write for money. And it alienates him from his closest friends. At a London publisher’s tony dinner party with writer friends and artists, Kellas explodes in rage and flees. Returning home, he finds an email invitation from Astrid and sets off to visit her in Virginia with a notion of redeeming himself. What he finds in himself and in Astrid is ultimately quite different from what he had expected to find.

Meek, himself a former war correspondent, writes with authority about the physical and psychological landscapes of war, especially wars that unfold through the reporting of modern media. He is deeply aware of the tragicomic aspects of contemporary life (the email message from Astrid, for example, was sent by a virus to everyone in her address book). He is a keen observer of the complexities of love and friendship. He fills We Are Now Beginning Our Descent to the brim with ideas. And while the plot slackens and occasionally staggers under the weight of its concepts, Meek holds onto our attention by writing some of the most breathtaking and provocative sentences in contemporary English.

Part of what was so amazing about James Meek's highly praised previous novel, The People's Act of Love, was that it successfully combined an ambitious novel of ideas with an epic historical thriller. Set in Siberia during the tumultuous aftermath of the Russian Revolution, that…

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