bookpagedev

Nature

Merle’s Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog

Review by bookpagedev

<b>Merle’s Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog</b> The dilemma of the canine’s true nature is explored by award-winning writer Ted Kerasote in <b>Merle’s Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog</b>. Touches of a crunchy-granola-hippie philosophy infuse the story that begins when a dog approaches outdoorsman Kerasote and his friends while they’re on a river camping trip in Utah. Apparently living on its own in the scrub among the Navajo, the friendly Lab mix endears itself to the whole camp; when they pack up for their next site downriver, the dog runs along the shore, unsure about leaving behind its familiar territory. But as in the best Disney story, the dog jumps into the boat at the very last second and chooses somewhat loosely Kerasote as his companion. Merle and the free-spirited writer return to his small Wyoming town and settle into the give-and-take of getting to know each other, mano-a-dogo. Kerasote observes, romanticizes, admires and resorts to the inexplicable to indulge, then curb Merle’s behavior, confused about how to help the dog adjust to life with humans while remaining wild. Though he often takes the observations of experts (Dr. Temple Grandin, the Monks of New Skete, Nobel Prize winner Konrad Lorenz, Dr. Richard Skinner) out of context to bolster his own preconceptions, Kerasote retains deep respect for Merle’s essential nature and longing for freedom. Blasting out of his doggie door to explore the countryside, visiting neighbors and hunting wild animals then returning to home and hearth, Merle leads Kerasote to ponder, make mistakes, love and learn. The unapologetic imperfection of Kerasote’s choices proves that relationships with dogs are as complicated as human ones, a reflection of our own essential humanity.

<b>Merle's Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog</b> The dilemma of the canine's true nature is explored by award-winning writer Ted Kerasote in <b>Merle's Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog</b>. Touches of a crunchy-granola-hippie philosophy infuse the story that begins when a dog approaches outdoorsman Kerasote…
Nature

The challenge and inspiration of our animal companions

Review by bookpagedev

Dog lovers and literary groupies alike will adore Shaggy Muses: The Dogs Who Inspired Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edith Wharton and Emily Bronte. This intimate glimpse of famous writers reveals brilliant, often reclusive and sometimes unbalanced artists who used beloved pets as confessors, companions, muses and even emotional stand-ins. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog Flush was her constant companion when he wasn’t being snatched by the dognappers common in 19th-century London. Flush became a literary go-between and romantic rival when the dashing Robert Browning came to call; he bit Browning twice, but they made up while walking the streets of Italy. Emily Bronte, who grew up to write the wild and disturbing Wuthering Heights, displayed disturbing behavior as a young girl by beating the family’s mastiff, then nursing its wounds. Edith Wharton posed with two Chihuahuas perched on her shoulders and obsessed over an annoying pack of Pekinese to avoid her husband’s infidelities and mental illness. Virginia Woolf described her purebred puppy as an angel of light who made her husband believe in God, perhaps counterbalancing the fact that the dog wet the floor eight times in one day. And Carlo the Newfoundland was the only audience for the reclusive poet Emily Dickinson, who insisted that she was more interested in Carlo’s approval than writing to please the public. When the dog died, Dickinson’s brief note to a friend was as poignant as any of her poems. Carlo died, she wrote. Would you instruct me now?

Dog lovers and literary groupies alike will adore Shaggy Muses: The Dogs Who Inspired Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edith Wharton and Emily Bronte. This intimate glimpse of famous writers reveals brilliant, often reclusive and sometimes unbalanced artists who used beloved pets as…
MusicArts & Culture

Highbrow fidelity

Review by bookpagedev

This is the ultimate book for classical music record geeks. Imagine John Cusack and Jack Black in High Fidelity obsessing about Wagner’s Ring instead of the Velvet Underground, and you’ll have an idea of the passion with which British music critic Norman Lebrecht details the century-long decline and fall of the classical recording industry. The Life and Death of Classical Music is a sad and sordid tale in other words, a real page-turner. Lebrecht does not hold back from expressing his Old-Testament-prophet horror over the unholy marriage between art and commerce. His lament is all the more lyrical because of his comprehensive grasp of the social and political context in which the quality of classical music recordings waxed (vinyled?) and waned. It’s bad enough to know that von Karajan’s recording career flourished under the Nazis; to learn, however, that the label Deutsche Grammophon employed slave labor during the war (including inmates from Auschwitz) to press those von Karajan recordings is enough to make you want to pull those old DG LP’s off your dusty shelf and smash them.

There’s something gleefully perverse about a book that hopes to sell by kvetching about how its subject won’t sell anymore. Lebrecht loves the recordings he loves, but he loves hating the recordings he hates even more. That’s one sublime geek.

Michael Alec Rose is an associate professor of composition at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music.

This is the ultimate book for classical music record geeks. Imagine John Cusack and Jack Black in High Fidelity obsessing about Wagner's Ring instead of the Velvet Underground, and you'll have an idea of the passion with which British music critic Norman Lebrecht details the…
Memoir

Midlife escape plan

Review by bookpagedev

Mary South’s book The Cure for Anything Is Salt Water: How I Threw My Life Overboard and Found Happiness at Sea, is the author’s response to any single, successful, midcareer woman who finds herself asking: Isn’t there more to life? A successful book editor (responsible for the bestseller The South Beach Diet), South decides, at the age of 40, to trade in the comforts of her life. She quits her job, sells her beloved home and leaves rural Pennsylvania for Florida, where she enrolls in seamanship school to learn how to navigate the 40-foot, 30-ton steel trawler she will call home until further notice. South never describes her decision as a midlife crisis but it’s clear that her trawler, Bossanova, is the shiny red sports car a man might buy on his 40th birthday.

South shares wonderful details of the ripple effects of her life-changing choice, including her humiliation over failing her seamanship midterm (and her determination to subsequently pass it) and her joy as she and her first mate John (a seamanship school buddy who is her polar opposite in every possible way) attempt to navigate Bossanova along the Atlantic coast from Florida to Sag Harbor, New York. During one rough sea encounter she is anxious for her two Jack Russell terriers who aren’t wearing life vests, though she and John are not wearing them either. South also writes about a love affair with Lars, a boat captain, which she says was unexpected given that she had lived as a lesbian for the last 20 years.

South’s book is a terrific, breezy, entertaining read. It’s easy to understand why she was such a successful editor she brings those same skills to her writing as she subtly compares her time on the water as a metaphor for navigating life’s challenges as we age and the choices we make to survive, thrive and flourish. The Cure for Anything Is Salt Water is in some ways similar to Frances Mayes’ Under the Tuscan Sun: Both authors, at crossroads in their lives, stepped outside their comfort zones, took chances and became happier and more complete for that road or, in the case of South, waterway taken.

Alas, Susan Rucci suffers from seasickness; her cure for her own midlife crisis will have to be found on land.

Mary South's book The Cure for Anything Is Salt Water: How I Threw My Life Overboard and Found Happiness at Sea, is the author's response to any single, successful, midcareer woman who finds herself asking: Isn't there more to life? A successful book editor (responsible…
Animals

The good vibrations of an elephant herd

Review by bookpagedev

In The Elephant’s Secret Sense, ecologist Caitlin O’Connell takes readers vicariously into the African country of Namibia, where the last migratory herd of African elephants shares the land with people. Farmers struggle to make a living, often seeing their efforts thwarted by elephants intent on eating their crops. The elephants, on the other hand, struggle themselves, finding their homeland infiltrated by humans, their migratory routes fenced and their lives threatened by poachers not to mention anthrax and drought.

O’Connell spent 14 years studying the behavioral patterns of elephants observing how the matriarch behaved when things were peaceful and how her behavior changed when she perceived the herd was in danger. With extensive research, she realized that elephants not only pick up signals with their ears, they also sense signals through the ground, seismically. By recording and playing back elephant talk their rumbles when they’re at peace, their let’s go rumbles and alarm calls she found similar reactions among elephants to seismic communication, played through the ground, and sounds heard through the air.

O’Connell creates vivid pictures of elephants that capture their individual personalities from the adorable baby elephants walking in their little footy pajamas trying to keep up with their mothers, rubbery trunks flopping in front of them, to the huge bulls who trail the breeding herds, hoping for an encounter with a willing female. The Elephant’s Secret Sense also portrays the author’s work with villagers in war-torn Namibia to promote conservation and preserve elephant habitat.

O’Connell’s fascinating field research, her passion in helping the people and elephants of Namibia coexist and her artistry as a writer all combine to make this an exceptionally engrossing read.

Carolyn Stalcup is on the executive council of the Elephant Sanctuary in Hohenwald, Tennessee, which provides a refuge for elephants from zoos and circuses.

In The Elephant's Secret Sense, ecologist Caitlin O'Connell takes readers vicariously into the African country of Namibia, where the last migratory herd of African elephants shares the land with people. Farmers struggle to make a living, often seeing their efforts thwarted by elephants intent on…
Biography

A filmmaker’s dramatic rise and fall

Review by bookpagedev

<b>A filmmaker’s dramatic rise and fall</b> Oscar Micheaux was an innovator and a revolutionary force as a filmmaker, entrepreneur and novelist, unquestionably black America’s first multimedia champion. But as Patrick Milligan’s exceptional new biography <b>Oscar Micheaux</b> shows, he was also a complex, driven figure whose ambition sometimes clouded his judgment, and whose objectives were so epic he was fated to fail in a society that during his lifetime neither acknowledged his greatness nor respected his achievements. Yet Micheaux wrote, produced and directed 40 feature-length films in every genre from musicals to Westerns, romances, gangster sagas and comedies during an amazing run from 1919 to 1948.

Micheaux considered himself a cinematic propagandist, and his productions an antidote to the horrendous images Hollywood was presenting where blacks were consigned to roles depicting them exclusively as servants, sexually crazed hoods or lazy bums. He had no limits regarding concept and saw absolutely nothing odd or unconventional about including interracial romances in films, examining color issues within the black community or spotlighting cruelty and injustice that occurred among everyday people.

But as Micheaux steadily built his film empire, he regularly encountered controversy and difficulty. Milligan details accusations of preference toward lighter-skinned performers and reveals that the celebrated director engaged in one case of plagiarism that had tragic consequences. Still, he also was responsible for numerous landmark feats, among them writing, producing and directing <i>The Homesteader</i> in 1919, not only filling all three roles on a production two years before Charlie Chaplin did the same thing to much larger fanfare, but also becoming the first African-American to do so; and later releasing <i>The Exile</i>, the first full-length African-American talking film, in 1931.

Milligan leaves no source untapped in his comprehensive account, using unpublished letters and financial records, among other things, to trace Micheaux’s life, fully documenting his spectacular rise and subsequent sad fall (he died in poverty in 1951). Though he was honored with the Director’s Guild of America Golden Jubilee Special Award in 1986 and a year later given a star on Hollywood Boulevard, Micheaux’s remarkable contributions remain unknown to even many hardcore film buffs. Fortunately, Milligan’s seminal work at least begins the process of getting him the attention and respect he deserves.

<i>Ron Wynn writes for the Nashville</i> City Paper <i>and other publications.</i>

<b>A filmmaker's dramatic rise and fall</b> Oscar Micheaux was an innovator and a revolutionary force as a filmmaker, entrepreneur and novelist, unquestionably black America's first multimedia champion. But as Patrick Milligan's exceptional new biography <b>Oscar Micheaux</b> shows, he was also a complex, driven figure whose…

History

Redefining America in the years following the Civil War

Review by bookpagedev

If the Civil War era was America’s Iliad, then historian Orville Vernon Burton is our latest Homer. Burton, a distinguished scholar at the University of Illinois, is best known for his widely acclaimed In My Father’s House Are Many Mansions (1985), a brilliantly nuanced social history of Edgefield County, South Carolina. With The Age of Lincoln, Burton has significantly widened his lens, ratcheted up his analysis and produced a magisterial narrative history of American social and intellectual life from the age of slavery up to the era of Jim Crow. New details, fresh insights and sparkling interpretations punctuate nearly every page of Burton’s fast-paced and elegantly written new book. In the best tradition of grand narrative history, Burton presents an overarching thesis and judiciously selects poignant episodes and pithy anecdotes to tell his epic story.

Americans before the Civil War, Burton explains, had a millennial vision and sought to fashion a perfect, godly society. Millennialism permeated antebellum political debate, undergirded the presumption of Manifest Destiny, and buttressed the understanding of honor. Though righteous men may have believed that they knew God’s plan, they disagreed in interpreting it. Extremes eroded any middle ground, Burton maintains, as powerful constituencies rallied to intransigent positions. Slavery, freedom, territorial expansion, partisan sectional conflict, the Civil War, emancipation, Reconstruction, Ku Klux Klan violence, labor unrest, immigration, agrarian revolt, lynchings and legalized segregation these and other forces confounded the millennium for 19th-century Americans, black and white, North and South.

Burton credits one man Abraham Lincoln with understanding and then reconciling America’s contradictions and extremes. Lincoln’s pragmatic theology, his reasoned tolerance, according to Burton, penetrated more than the Rail-splitter’s speeches and stories; it shaped his democratic creed. Through the stormy secession crisis and the darkest days of the Civil War, Lincoln stood with the hopeless sinners, not the smugly saved. His religious fatalism transmuted into a clear belief that God was working out a plan for human history, and that he himself was an instrument in that plan. Burton identifies the Thirteenth Amendment as the president’s most enduring achievement. Though in 1861 Lincoln had called up 75,000 military volunteers to suppress the Southern rebellion not to emancipate the South’s slaves by late 1862 he had concluded that squashing the rebellion necessitated freeing the Confederacy’s bondmen and women. However moral, complex, and far-reaching this decision, Burton notes, Lincoln understood very well that the Emancipation Proclamation was a weapon of war. He also understood that emancipation dovetailed with a larger, millennial understanding of what was at stake in the war. The internecine struggle forced Lincoln and indirectly all Americans since to confront basic inequities in the moral foundations of American democracy. He slowly came to appreciate that if his grasp of America’s millennial hope and dreams was sincere, honor required him to extend freedom to African Americans. Moreover, Burton continues, emancipation freed Lincoln from the confines of contradictory war goals fighting a war for democratic liberty but not against slavery. Though the interests of capitalists ultimately supplanted those of the freedpeople, Lincoln’s ideas and his civil religion still define American democracy. The United States, as he explained at Gettysburg, remains a nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. John David Smith is the Charles H. Stone Distinguished Professor of American History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

If the Civil War era was America's Iliad, then historian Orville Vernon Burton is our latest Homer. Burton, a distinguished scholar at the University of Illinois, is best known for his widely acclaimed In My Father's House Are Many Mansions (1985), a brilliantly nuanced social…
Sports

It’s all about the bike

Review by bookpagedev

Having catapulted over my handlebars on too many occasions to count (with two broken collarbones to mark my mishaps) and having met my share of dogs, coyotes, peacocks, cougars, bears and bulls on the back roads of Northern California, I feel a deep kinship with the 27 cyclist- sufferers who offer up their bruised but mostly undaunted spirits in Cycling’s Greatest Misadventures.

True, I have not had a live rat caught in my front spokes ("Riding Tandem with Rodent"). Nor have I sought to repair a flat with dental floss ("Genius, Not Genius"). Or taken a seriously wrong path while mountain biking in Bolivia ("The Jungle is Hungry"). Or, for that matter, used a bike ride as a sort of grand treasure hunt among rural junk piles ("Lost and Found in Boise, Idaho"). But I really, truly catch these writers’ drifts.

Most of these mostly short (two- to seven-page) vignettes have a wry joke-is-on-me tone with that blend of steely bravado and self-deprecating humor you find at the third rest stop of a century on a drizzly day. Some pieces are historical: "Iron Riders," for example, tells the history of a seemingly crazy 19th-century attempt to turn Buffalo Soldiers into bicycle cavalry. Some strike a more somber note: "The Shock and Numbness Are Starting to Set In" tells of a bike tour leader who sees sweet, elderly cyclists in her charge killed by criminally inattentive drivers. The volume also contains some wince-inducing photos in its "Bike Crash Photo Gallery."

All in all, Cycling’s Greatest Misadventures proves an interesting read for cyclists and armchair cyclists alike. These riders’ pain is our gain.

Having catapulted over my handlebars on too many occasions to count (with two broken collarbones to mark my mishaps) and having met my share of dogs, coyotes, peacocks, cougars, bears and bulls on the back roads of Northern California, I feel a deep kinship with…

Biography

A writer’s life, layer by layer

Review by bookpagedev

<b>A writer’s life, layer by layer</b> Although this book is too chronologically ordered to be called stream-of-consciousness, German author Gunter Grass does ping-pong freely along the linear time scale as one remembered image, sound or smell incites another. His is less a conventional biography than a series of glimpses into the thought processes of an evolving artist. Translated into English by Michael Henry Heim, <b>Peeling the Onion</b> covers Grass’ life from his pre-World War II childhood in Danzig to his move to Paris in 1956, where he began writing <i>The Tin Drum</i>.

Grass explains his limitations (and displays his generally droll style) thusly: Having grown up in a family that was expelled from house and home, in contrast to writers of my generation who grew up in one place . . . and are therefore in full possession of their school records and juvenilia, and having ipso facto no concrete evidence of my early years, I can call only the most questionable of witnesses to the stand: Lady Memory, a capricious creature prone to migraines and reputed to smile at the highest bidder. The son of a small-time grocer, Grass recalls that even as a child, he felt a genteel contempt for his family’s petit bourgeois ways; however, he earned his spending money by collecting overdue bills for his father. His mercantile canniness would later serve him well at an American prisoner of war camp and as he searched to find his own place in Germany’s postwar economy.

In recounting his life, Grass shifts fluidly (and sometimes maddeningly) between first and third person. And he can be a bit coy: My new marching orders made it clear where the recruit with my name was to undergo basic training: on a drill ground of the Waffen SS, as a Panzer gunner, somewhere far off in the Bohemian Woods. Inducted near the end of the war, he saw relatively little combat but quite enough to disabuse him of any lingering romantic or nationalistic notions. (And enough to lead to considerable discussion of his previous silence on the subject when the book was published in Germany last summer.) Threaded through Grass’ narrative are visceral accounts of his coming to terms with his three great appetites food, sex and art. He also repeatedly cites specific situations and characters that later found their way into his fiction (for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1999). For most of this book, Grass is simply another wartime survivor searching for an identity. But as his artistic vision takes form and draws him into the company of kindred seekers, one can sense the excitement of a new generation on the move.

<i>Edward Morris reviews from Nashville.</i>

<b>A writer's life, layer by layer</b> Although this book is too chronologically ordered to be called stream-of-consciousness, German author Gunter Grass does ping-pong freely along the linear time scale as one remembered image, sound or smell incites another. His is less a conventional biography than…

History

Taking the U.

S. from sea to shining sea

Review by bookpagedev

The frontier looms large in the American imagination. In 1893, historian Frederick Jackson Turner, in an influential essay, wrote: The frontier is productive of individualism. The tendency is anti-social. It produces antipathy to control, and particularly to any direct control. The tax-gatherer is viewed as a representative of oppression. Andro Linklater, in his provocative new book, The Fabric of America, disagrees. Turner’s view, he writes, bears no relation to reality. What made the settlement of the West such an iconic American experience was precisely that it took place under the umbrella of the U.S. government. The first thing a person who claimed a particular piece of land wanted to do was to register its use and a claim to ownership first unofficially with others in the claim group, then officially with the government. From early on, the settlers were defined by boundaries. Linklater points out that the longest clause in the Articles of Confederation dealt with border disputes between states. Perhaps it was appropriate that young George Washington was a surveyor and land speculator.

At the heart of Linklater’s narrative is Andrew Ellicott (1754-1820), a gifted astronomer and surveyor who played a major role in determining the borders of no fewer than eleven states and the District of Columbia, as well as the southern and northern frontiers of the United States. Beyond Ellicott’s personal experiences, Linklater, author of the acclaimed Measuring America, explains how decisions concerning boundaries and property made a crucial impact on American history. When John Quincy Adams negotiated the Adams-Onis treaty with Spain in 1819, for example, his diplomacy had parlayed [Andrew] Jackson’s illegal raid into a massive acquisition of territory from Florida to Oregon, expanding the U.S. for the first time from coast to coast.

Linklater gives us a different perspective than we usually get when reading about how the U.S. developed. The frontier experience took place not only in wide open spaces, but within the borders of the United States. How that happened is an important story and Linklater tells it splendidly.

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

The frontier looms large in the American imagination. In 1893, historian Frederick Jackson Turner, in an influential essay, wrote: The frontier is productive of individualism. The tendency is anti-social. It produces antipathy to control, and particularly to any direct control. The tax-gatherer is viewed as…
Memoir

With green card, through Iraq

Review by bookpagedev

In the current focus on the sectarian violence in Iraq between Sunnis and Shiites, it’s easy to forget that the country was once a more cosmopolitan place, with Jews and Christians living among the Muslims. Few are left, but small communities hang on, including about 20,000 Armenian Christians. Shant Kenderian’s prosperous, well-educated family was once among them, but his mother didn’t want to stay. After her marriage broke up, she took Shant and his brother to Chicago. Shant, at 15, found himself the lucky possessor of a green card legal U.S. residency.

But he missed his father and, at 17, made what turned out to be a serious error. He went back to Baghdad in 1980, just as Iraq’s war with Iran began. The borders shut down. What happened next is the subject of 1001 Nights in Iraq, Kenderian’s stirring memoir of his forced service in the Iraqi navy, his capture by the Americans during the First Gulf War in 1990-1991 and his ceaseless quest to return to the U.S.

Kenderian brings a rare perspective to his experiences that of an Armenian who can see both the Iraqi Muslims and the Americans with an outsider’s objectivity. He describes the Iraqi military as an institution of brutality and incompetence, filled with clueless draftees understandably terrified of their government. The book’s most exciting and tragic scenes come as Kenderian’s patrol boat is blown up by an Iraqi mine a friendly fire disaster made even worse when the wounded crew is abandoned by a Red Crescent vessel.

The Americans come off somewhat better, but Kenderian runs into as much stubborn ignorance as kindness during his weeks as a prisoner of war. A faction among his interrogators believe he must be a spy because he speaks English. But other Americans are decent and curious, and Kenderian even finds romance with a female truck driver.

Throughout, Kenderian is sustained by his belief in God and his faith that the Americans will finally see reason. Today, as we again struggle in Iraq, his story can remind all sides of their common humanity.

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

 

In the current focus on the sectarian violence in Iraq between Sunnis and Shiites, it's easy to forget that the country was once a more cosmopolitan place, with Jews and Christians living among the Muslims. Few are left, but small communities hang on, including…

Science Fiction & FantasyFantasy

A new take on the Old West

Review by bookpagedev

You’ll never see old Westerns the same way after reading Territory, Emma Bull’s re-imagining of the frontier West. In 1881, a rider arrives in Tombstone, Arizona, with a man he has shot. The injured party dies, but no one cares his death is merely the first piece of frontier justice in this gritty novel. The survivor, Jesse Fox, is a horse wrangler whose secrets are slowly revealed.

One of the first people Jesse meets is Mildred Benjamin, a widow enjoying her reputation as an eccentric while setting type and proofreading one of the two local newspapers. Mildred tries her hand at journalism following a land grab a plotline which peters out but perhaps will be continued in another novel. She also runs up against the real powerhouses in town, the Earp brothers. Doc Holliday and his charismatic wife, Kate, have followed the Earps from Dodge City for two reasons. First, they are convinced it will make their fortune, and second, Wyatt Earp has a strange grip and influence over Holliday. Earp’s charisma is strong enough to hold almost anyone and Jesse suspects there’s more to it than meets the eye. But when Fox tries to tell Mildred his suspicions about the Earp family and their use of blood magic to rule the town, she won’t believe him until she sees proof.

Bull, author of several novels, including Finder (1994) and, with Steven Brust, Freedom and Necessity (1997), lives in Arizona, and her version of Wild West mythology seems to rise naturalistically from her knowledge of the land. Many of the characters are living on the edge of the law in a time when the laws were often not yet fully written. Who owns land that belonged to a people who were pushed off of it? The law is maligned, bent and challenged. But Mildred and Jesse provide a high moral center to Territory that pulls the reader into the novel and, despite occasional slow patches (usually where Doc Holliday is the point of view character), right through to the ending at the OK Corral, when the Earps and their rule is shaken in a way that somehow never came up when cowboy movies ruled our imaginations. Gavin J. Grant is co-editor of The Year’s Best Fantasy &andamp; Horror 2007: 20th Annual Collection, to be published this summer by St. Martin’s Press.

You'll never see old Westerns the same way after reading Territory, Emma Bull's re-imagining of the frontier West. In 1881, a rider arrives in Tombstone, Arizona, with a man he has shot. The injured party dies, but no one cares his death is merely the…
Fiction

No species left behind

Review by bookpagedev

There are coming-of-age novels, and then there are the odd and mystical tales written by novelist and poet Nicholas Christopher. His latest effort, The Bestiary, bounds from New York City tenements to Vietnam to the Mediterranean as we follow the heroically named Xeno Atlas on his quest for dragons. OK, maybe not dragons, exactly, but how far behind can the fairy-tale firebreathers be when we’re on the trail of griffins, centaurs and the legendary phoenix? What Xeno seeks is the Caravan Bestiary, a book listing all of the animals that were supposedly left off of Noah’s Ark. The book, which has danced in and out of history since the Middle Ages, becomes an obsession for Xeno. It’s not hard to understand why.

Like the mythical creatures of the Bestiary, Xeno also has been left behind. His mother died in childbirth and his sailor father is a sporadic presence in Xeno’s life. His only friends are a sickly boy named Bruno and his sister Lena, at whose home he spends as much time as he does in the Bronx apartment he shares with his grandmother. When his grandmother dies, Xeno’s father shunts him off to boarding school, where a professor tells him about the Bestiary. As in most of Christopher’s novels, his language possesses a lyricism that sets it apart from the ordinary. Xeno also avoids the prosaic. He goes off to war and comes back whole. At a crossroads, he resumes his passionate hunt for the Bestiary. The chase allows him to forget about the bleakness of his own lonely life. If you search for something long enough, you become the quest. It soon becomes evident that while trying to discover the ancient tome, Xeno is trying to discover himself. But sometimes, even when the journey remains unchanging, the destination has unwittingly transformed. And Xeno, like so many others, finds out that what he really was looking for was right in front of him all the time. Ian Schwartz writes from San Diego.

There are coming-of-age novels, and then there are the odd and mystical tales written by novelist and poet Nicholas Christopher. His latest effort, The Bestiary, bounds from New York City tenements to Vietnam to the Mediterranean as we follow the heroically named Xeno Atlas on…

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