bookpagedev

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Remember those wonderful books and stories of your youth? Whether you grew up reading Nancy Drew or Winnie-the-Pooh, you no doubt recall the power and passion of books that moved you when you were first starting to read. In his new book, Rainbow Mars, Larry Niven appeals to that nostalgia.

In the 24th-century world of Hanville Svetz, time travel is a reality. Most of his temporal dislocation projects have been influenced by the personal whims of the United Nations galactic leadership, who wanted Svetz to travel to the past in order to capture extinct animals and bring them to the future. So far, Svetz has blundered on every time trip, but ultimately succeeded because he brought back even more exotic animals than he was sent to capture. (Would you believe Moby Dick in place of a regular whale, Quetzalcoatl instead of a snake, and a unicorn instead of a horse?) Now U.

N. leadership has changed, and the new ruler wants space travel and an exploration of Professor Lowell’s discredited Canals of Mars. Svetz figures out a way to get to Mars almost a thousand years in the past when, amazingly, the Canals do exist and are populated by numerous exotic alien species. As you read Niven’s descriptions, allusions to legendary science fiction characters suddenly become apparent characters such as Tars Tarkas from the Edgar Rice Burroughs lexicon of Barsoomian adventures, and various other Martian depictions courtesy of Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Stanley Weinbaum, and C.

S. Lewis.

Larry Niven enthralls readers with his skillful integration of myth, legend, fantasy, and classic science fiction. This is his best novel since the Hugo Award-winning Ringworld. Rainbow Mars also includes Niven’s five original short stories about Svetz’s adventures that were written over 25 years ago.

Larry D. Woods, an attorney, is an avid reader of science fiction.

Remember those wonderful books and stories of your youth? Whether you grew up reading Nancy Drew or Winnie-the-Pooh, you no doubt recall the power and passion of books that moved you when you were first starting to read. In his new book, Rainbow Mars, Larry…

Fiction

New novel is vintage Flagg

Review by bookpagedev

Welcome to Elmwood Springs, Missouri the fictional setting of Fannie Flagg’s long-awaited novel, Welcome to the World, Baby Girl. As near perfect as you can get without having to get downright sentimental about it or making up a bunch of lies, this neighborly town is filled with charming, quirky characters and has a strong, endearing sense of community.

Dena Nordstrom—otherwise known lovingly as Baby Girl—is the surprisingly well-adjusted daughter of Norma and Macky Nordstrom. And though Dena has left Elmwood Springs to become a TV anchorwoman and the pride and joy of her network, her hometown is still an intrinsic part of her, and she of it. With a future full of promise, Dena survives her complicated present and her mysterious past, all of which are tied to Elmwood Springs.

Flagg, an Alabama native, has, time and again, proven her mastery of storytelling, her ability to make each character vivid and real. Welcome to the World is no different. With an expert ear for language, Flagg, through her narrator, lovingly invites us to be a part of this community that is Elmwood Springs, this community with bounds far more reaching than any map could measure.

Much of this novel is vintage Flagg. For instance, Aunt Elner blesses Dena’s heart from afar over the fact that she eats in restaurants day and night up in New York City. Mourning the lack of anything homemade in Dena’s diet, Aunt Elner decides to make use of her stockpile of hickory nuts and send her my hickory nut cake with the caramel icing. There are no hidden symbols in this cake, no hidden answer to a mystery. This and other examples have little or no bearing on the plot at all. These entertaining asides, however, are ultimately the essence of Flagg’s novel.

Through unmistakable voices and rich ties to home, Welcome to the World illustrates how much a part of a person place can be. You can take the baby girl out of Elmwood Springs, but you can’t take Elmwood Springs out of the baby girl.

Pat Patrick is a reviewer in Nashville.

Welcome to Elmwood Springs, Missouri the fictional setting of Fannie Flagg's long-awaited novel, Welcome to the World, Baby Girl. As near perfect as you can get without having to get downright sentimental about it or making up a bunch of lies, this neighborly town is…

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Review

Review by bookpagedev

With his debut novel, The Jackal of Nar, John Marco has now joined the ranks of Robert Jordan, Terry Brooks, Stephen Donaldson, and, of course, J.

R.

R. Tolkien.

As the novel opens, the title character, also known as Prince Richius Vantran of Aramoor, is battling the warlords of Lucel-Lor at the orders of his emperor, Arkus the Great. Fighting against impossible odds, he realizes that just because the religious zealots of Lucel-Lor are evil madmen doesn’t mean that Emperor Arkus is completely sane himself. As the story progresses, the reader’s idea of right and wrong, good and evil, is constantly challenged. All of the characters, from Richius to Arkus to the evil priest Tharn, are more complex than they first appear. Each has his own hopes and ambitions, and a variety of loyalties which are not always aligned with each other.

The plot of The Jackal of Nar could have been straightforward, but Marco manages to put in enough twists to confound the reader’s expectations. The politics and relationships within the novel do not always seem solid, but they lend themselves to the mechanizations required to build the complexity of the book.

Another of Marco’s strengths is his ability to paint vivid and graphic images of his characters’ world and bring the wonder of this land to the reader. He may, however, carry this imagery a little too far in his description of some scenes of carnage.

Marco promises that The Jackal of Nar is only the first of his Tyrants and Kings series. While it is obvious where he intends to begin the next book, he also manages to wrap up the action begun in The Jackal of Nar so the book stands very well on its own. The Jackal of Nar is an excellent introduction to a new author and promises more fantastic adventures set in this rich and complex world.

Steven H. Silver is a freelance book reviewer in Northbrook, Illinois.

With his debut novel, The Jackal of Nar, John Marco has now joined the ranks of Robert Jordan, Terry Brooks, Stephen Donaldson, and, of course, J.

R.

R. Tolkien.

As the novel opens, the title character,…

Nonfiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

In God of the Rodeo, Daniel Bergner describes an increasingly contentious relationship between himself and Burl Cain, Warden of Angola Prison in Louisiana. Bergner, a freelance journalist, was attracted to Angola in 1996 by the prison’s rodeo, an annual competition with a 32-year history that takes place over the four Sundays in October. Preparing to write about the rodeo required several months’ research during which the warden at first allowed Bergner wide access to the prison, only to limit him as time progressed. This led to a series of conflicts, which Bergner eventually went to court to resolve.

The rodeo and the conflict form the lens through which the author focuses on both the warden and several inmates. In this examination, readers will learn something about the operation of old-style prison farms. They will also discover a more complicated persona in the warden than immediately meets the eye. You see Warden Cain charm a group of faculty and students at the University of Massachusetts as he describes holding the hand of an inmate being executed by lethal injection and adding religious and educational programs to help inmates. The book, however, presents another picture of Cain back in Angola as he requires rodeo riders to wear the wide-stripped uniforms abandoned years ago as inmate uniform and as he demands a payoff from the author for continued access to the prison to complete the book. Bergner also portrays the complexity of some inmates whose behavior is difficult to comprehend. Johnny, Littell, Danny, Buckkey, Myron, and others emerge as individuals searching for meaning, hope, and even redemption in a setting where the larger community offers them few resources and a punitive environment in which to live.

God of the Rodeo is not for the faint-hearted. At the same time it illustrates that good as well as evil exists on both sides of the prison fence.

Amos Wilson is a chaplain in the Tennessee Department of Corrections.

In God of the Rodeo, Daniel Bergner describes an increasingly contentious relationship between himself and Burl Cain, Warden of Angola Prison in Louisiana. Bergner, a freelance journalist, was attracted to Angola in 1996 by the prison's rodeo, an annual competition with a 32-year history that…

Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Readers know they can count on Robin Cook for a thriller that never lets up in intensity until the final page, and Vector is no different. It’s a true page-turner, with a little levity thrown in for good measure.

Yuri Davydov is a Russian emigre who drives a cab in New York City. He hates it. He has also begun to hate his adopted country because he believes it has denied him his slice of the American Dream. He is snarled at by customers, ignored by other drivers, and pushed to near distraction by his wife, a compulsive eater and chronic complainer.

Davydov has the skills to strike out at the whole world. In his homeland, he was a technician in the Soviet biological weapons program his last assignment being at a plant identified only as Vector.

He falls in with a couple of firemen named Curt and Steve who find out about Davydov’s capabilities. They have a deadly project of their own they want to blow up a federal building. Davydov would simply like to release anthrax in Central Park and kill a few thousand people.

He has already experimented on a few poor-tipping fares and sundry other souls. Now, at the behest of Curt and Steve, Davydov decides that his wife must be killed for security reasons so he kills her.

In the meantime, Drs. Jack Stapleton and Laurie Montgomery begin to witness some rather curious things in their capacity as forensic pathologists, including the fact that a young, reasonably healthy black woman is dead of respiratory failure. She is Yuri Davydov’s wife. But before Stapleton can get through the bureaucracy to request permission for an autopsy, she is cremated.

Stapleton begins to think that a series of curious coincidences is really a string of murders, but nobody except Laurie believes him; his superiors and colleagues are skeptical. Some think Stapleton is off his rocker, to put it mildly.

It becomes a race against time for Jack and Laurie to solve what amounts to a jigsaw puzzle with lots of missing pieces. If they do not, thousands may die in a city most vulnerable to biological weapons. Cook has a super-charged story to tell, and as usual, he tells it very well. Lloyd Armour is a retired newspaper editor.

Readers know they can count on Robin Cook for a thriller that never lets up in intensity until the final page, and Vector is no different. It's a true page-turner, with a little levity thrown in for good measure.

Yuri Davydov is…

Arts & Culture

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Voter turnout is in steep decline. Public policy debates grow ever-more uncivil. Even mainstays of civic life like the PTA struggle to maintain members. So is good citizenship dead? Michael Schudson, a professor of sociology at the University of California in San Diego, doesn’t think so. In The Good Citizen, a history of three centuries of American civic life, Schudson argues essentially that practices of citizenship have changed and evolved as the American political system has changed and evolved.

According to Schudson, we have passed through three distinct eras of civic life and have now entered a fourth. Each era has formulated its own model of citizenship, with its own unique virtues and shortcomings. All of these past models continue to influence our thinking and behavior. The cherished ideal of the informed citizen, for example, is a still-powerful vestige of the progressive era of the last century.

But, as Schudson convincingly points out, none of these earlier models is adequate for our present era, a period defined by a profound revolution in rights, with politics permeating virtually every aspect of life. So Schudson proposes a model he calls the monitorial citizen. Such citizens, he says, are like parents watching their children at the community pool, seemingly inactive but poised for action if action is required. Citizenship of this sort may be for many people much less intense than in the era of parties, but citizenship is now a year-round, day-long activity, as it was only rarely in the past. This is a fascinating, if somewhat academic, argument. It certainly merits wider thought and discussion. But readers can strongly disagree with Schudson’s analysis or simply ignore it and still find The Good Citizen an interesting read.

Like all good histories, The Good Citizen forcefully reminds us that what seems chiseled in stone today was often a matter of contentious debate in an earlier time. For example, strong political parties are seen today as one of America’s chief contributions to the democratic process; but parties and factions were loathed and feared by the Founding Fathers. We often point to the Lincoln-Douglas debates as a high point in our political discourse; but as Schudson slyly points out, these debates had no effect on the election (since U.S. Senators were selected by state legislators at the time).

Schudson weaves these and other equally interesting observations together to make another important point: there has never been a Golden Age of good citizenship before which our own age pales. As Schudson says, citizenship has not disappeared. It has not even declined. It has, inevitably, changed. That’s good news.

Alden Mudge is a writer in Oakland, California, and a frequent contributor to BookPage.

Voter turnout is in steep decline. Public policy debates grow ever-more uncivil. Even mainstays of civic life like the PTA struggle to maintain members. So is good citizenship dead? Michael Schudson, a professor of sociology at the University of California in San Diego, doesn't think…

Mystery & SuspenseMystery

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Liberty Falling, the latest installment in Nevada Barr’s Anna Pigeon series, finds the park ranger/sleuth in the Big Apple. Not a lot of call for a park ranger in New York City, one might think, but in fact one of the most popular tourist parks in the country can be found within the city limits: Ellis and Liberty Islands, home of the Statue of Liberty.

Anna has rather more personal reasons for being in New York City: Her sister Molly is in the ICU of Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, and Anna must face the prospect of her sister’s possible death. Because she can’t bear to stay at her sister’s apartment, Anna bunks with an old ranger buddy out on Liberty Island.

From the outset, her stay is punctuated by bizarre and deadly events: a young girl apparently dives to her death from the observation platform in the crown of the statue; someone in the onlooking crowd claims that the girl had some help from an aggressive park ranger; within days, said ranger is found dead; Anna is pushed in front of an oncoming subway, only to be saved at the last moment by a casual passerby. Given to paranoia at the best of times, Anna tries to dismiss the events as coincidence, but as the week wears on it becomes more and more difficult.

Liberty Falling is something of a departure for Nevada Barr. In several of Anna’s earlier adventures, the crimes centered around time-honored themes of jealousy or greed. The bad guys (and/or girls) in Liberty Falling are not so simply motivated; conspiracy piles upon conspiracy until Anna is literally awash in a sea of red herring (and worse, considering that it’s New York Harbor after all). The fate of the premiere symbol of freedom hangs in the balance.

One cannot help but agree with beleaguered Anna as she quips: All the world’s a plot, and all the men and women in it merely suspects. Bruce Tierney lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

Liberty Falling, the latest installment in Nevada Barr's Anna Pigeon series, finds the park ranger/sleuth in the Big Apple. Not a lot of call for a park ranger in New York City, one might think, but in fact one of the most popular tourist parks…

FictionHistorical Fiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

What I wouldn’t give for a gaggle of ancestors like Janice Woods Windle’s. They make such marvelous fiction! Although, to tell the truth, perhaps all of us have these characters in our background and simply lack the documentation, or the energy, to search it out. Why, I remember tales about my Grandma Fahs . . . but, right, we’re talking about Windle’s good luck.

Still, while the author’s pedigree, with its Texas setting and larger-than-life family stories, may have been a lucky stroke, every page of this extraordinary novel about an extraordinary woman must owe its accomplishment to hard labor and a mighty gift of re-creation. Laura Woods would have been proud of her granddaughter.

The leading lady of Hill Country, Laura was an intelligent, simple, complicated woman. Born about 1868, she led a Texas-sized life, jam-packed with experiences ranging from Indian raids to helping her dearest friend’s baby boy, Lyndon Johnson, grow up to be President of the United States. She witnessed the community lynching of a white murderer, fell in love with a pariah, lived alone on a wilderness ranch, endured Mexican revolutionary violence and a horrible train wreck, helplessly watched a daughter’s slide into schizophrenia, engaged in feminist and political activities, flew with Charles Lindbergh and, aged 93, moved to California. When that didn’t work, she got herself back to Texas again, hampered by age but up to the challenge. Last seen, she’s doing for herself once again, happily skipping a rest home in San Marcos.

During this long life, she wrote everything down: random thoughts, momentary furies, things she must do, things others should do, observed injustices, acknowledgment of the folly and error of those around her. She saved them all, along with carbons of letters giving advice to 11 American presidents and many other public personalities, and boxes full of photographs, newspaper articles, campaign materials from political contests she had worked in, and voluminous correspondence and personal files. In her seventies, she started to write a book about her life, and, if the purported excerpts in Hill Country are authentic, she possessed a writing style and wisdom equal to Windle’s own.

That’s saying a lot because, except for a grating tendency to use like for as, Windle’s work is fresh and imaginative. She rarely settles for cliches, and her evocation of very old age seems remarkably real. (As far as I can tell, of course.) She has wisely chosen to tell Laura’s story in novel form. This worked well with Windle’s first novel True Women, which uses other feisty feminine forbears as the basis for punchy, adventurous storytelling. Hill Country repeats themes from the earlier book, but its power is intensified by the focus on a single, strong woman.

There’s heft to this book, of the human kind that comes from the substance of a life lived in real time and historic circumstances. Some might call her a survivor, but that word is too passive for Laura. She doesn’t just endure life, she triumphs over it.

Maude McDaniel is a freelance writer in Cumberland, Maryland.

What I wouldn't give for a gaggle of ancestors like Janice Woods Windle's. They make such marvelous fiction! Although, to tell the truth, perhaps all of us have these characters in our background and simply lack the documentation, or the energy, to search it out.…

Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Review

Review by bookpagedev

In his latest international thriller, The Marching Season, Daniel Silva continues the unique blend of fact and fiction that gives his stories the immediacy and urgency of the evening news. Michael Osbourne, the CIA officer who narrowly survived an assassination attempt by a former KGB killer, code named October in The Mark of the Assassin, retired from the agency and eased into a comfortable, domestic routine with his Wall Street lawyer wife Elizabeth and their young twins. The Marching Season begins several years later when Douglas Cannon, Elizabeth’s father and a retired U.

S. senator, accepts appointment as the American ambassador to Great Britain with a commitment to advance a fragile peace agreement in Northern Ireland, the Good Friday Accords. Despite its acceptance by the country’s major political factions, the agreement also spawned a few small extremist groups dedicated to destruction of the peace process. One such group, the Ulster Freedom Brigade (UFB), begins a bombing campaign and then sets its sights on Douglas Cannon as its next high-profile target. Michael’s longtime friend lures him back into service in the agency’s effort to reinforce British security measures to protect the new ambassador.

The expected attack on Cannon and Osbourne’s role are reminiscent of a younger Jack Ryan in Tom Clancy’s Patriot Games. Silva’s narrative has the same effect on this earlier fictional creation as tilting a holographic picture; the reader suddenly sees a new and intriguing perspective.

With The Marching Season, Daniel Silva confirms his position as a frontrunner to succeed Tom Clancy as America’s foremost source of international intrigue fiction. Clearly, Osbourne has a great future; one that Silva will share with his many admirers.

John Messer is a freelance reviewer in Ludington, Michigan.

In his latest international thriller, The Marching Season, Daniel Silva continues the unique blend of fact and fiction that gives his stories the immediacy and urgency of the evening news. Michael Osbourne, the CIA officer who narrowly survived an assassination attempt by a former KGB…

Fiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Although Alex Haley, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Roots, has been dead since 1992, works bearing his name continue to surface, capitalizing on the momentum generated by the soaring best-selling 1977 family epic which sold millions of copies. The posthumous canon of Haley resumed in 1993 with the more modest success of his last novel, Queen, the tale of the writer’s paternal great-grandmother that produced a notable three-episode TV miniseries. Now, screenwriter David Stevens, who wrote Queen from the research notes and tapes of Haley, reprises his role as the late novelist’s collaborator with their new offering, Mama Flora’s Family, the fictional saga of the gutsy matriarch of a clan of poor black Arkansas sharecroppers.

The latest Haley-Stevens effort avoids the criticisms that surrounded Queen and the Roots phenomenon by sticking with a big multigenerational story touching on all of the large themes common to their work: familial love, persistence, courage, racism, temptation, and religious faith. Stevens, drawing on his formidable ability as a storyteller, spends ample time with the strong yet flawed Mama Flora, whose determination to survive in a brutal Jim Crow South quickly earns our respect. Following the murder of her husband Booker, she overcomes the deep sorrow from his death through hard work and prayer. Nothing will stop her from achieving a better life for her son, Willie, and her sister Josie’s child, Ruthana, adopted after the woman’s tragic death.

Stevens skillfully transforms the central story from the usual traditional, long-suffering Big Mama variety into a classic metaphor for the harsh emotional and psychological costs of the Great Migration confronting African Americans fleeing the South. It is the battle of Willie, attempting to adapt to fast Chicago life, that spells out the high price of assimilating into a new, hostile world. But he stubbornly survives and becomes a man. Like many blacks, he signs up to fight in the segregated military during World War II to prove something to a country that still denied equal rights to all. Maybe patriotism could change that, he thinks but it does not, as Stevens painfully reveals.

If the author etches accurate portrayals of Flora and Willie, the leading characters, through the depressed 1930s, zoot suit 1940s, and Eisenhower 1950s, he then reaches full stride in his astute characterization of the politicized Ruthana in the militant Black Power days of the 1960s and 1970s. Although she bucks the home-spun values of Mama Flora, searching for a self-affirming existence, the young woman keeps the bed-rock truths of family and tradition close to her heart unlike others in the clan who succumb to drugs and other temptations.

There is nothing fancy about the narrative that drives this sprawling family yarn, but the people and events will stay with the reader long after the last page is read. With Mama Flora’s Family listed as Haley’s final work, his literary legacy, rich with accomplishments, concludes on a respectable, competent note.

Robert Fleming is a writer in New York.

Although Alex Haley, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Roots, has been dead since 1992, works bearing his name continue to surface, capitalizing on the momentum generated by the soaring best-selling 1977 family epic which sold millions of copies. The posthumous canon of Haley resumed in…
Fiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

I had a roommate in college who used to leave guests doubled over on the floor with a hilarious cultural critique of what he deemed the eight basic plot lines of the Family Circus comic strip. All those laughs came rushing back in sinister spades while reading J. Robert Lennon’s slightly wacky, partly dark, but often charming second novel The Funnies. Lennon has imagined the life of characters in Family Follies, a thinly veiled Family Circus. Rather than the placid, domestic space of a cartoon where inevitably the dog does something cute and everyone get along, Lennon has embodied his fictional family with phobias, neuroses, bitter sibling rivalries, and eerie family secrets all doused in a generous splash of alcohol. But from this veritable cornucopia of 1990s dysfunction comes a rather winning novel, one as equal on laughs as it is on probing steadiness.

The protagonist and voice of the novel is Tim Mix, the second son of five children, who inherits the Family Follies strip from his now-dead father, Carl (he dies in the first line of the book). While loved by countless millions across the country, Carl was not the portrait of goodness portrayed in the strip, and his real family bears little resemblance to the idealized cartoon. The bulk of the novel traces Tim’s transformation from naifish conceptual artist to a bona fide cartoonist. It doesn’t always go well. As he moves back into his boyhood house, Tim not only fights family demons, but also has to worry about Ken Dorn, a rival cartoonist who wants the Family Follies strip so badly he often stalks Tim, much like Claire Quilty in Nabokov’s Lolita. Lennon’s voice is easy-going, and the narrative clips along nicely, often effectively using underlying familial tension as a type of unseen or understated character. Tim’s siblings are interesting and well drawn, especially Pierce, the 28-year-old paranoid who never moved out of his parent’s home. Not as successful, however, is the figure of Dot Mix, the mother, now in a nursing home in the shroud of alcohol-induced senility. Pierce and Tim’s desire to get her out of the home doesn’t necessarily add to the more successful, detailed, and dynamic relationships in the book. But this relationship, as well as a sometimes disjointed last third of the book, does not ruin an otherwise excellent novel. Lennon has tremendous skills of description, providing the right amount of detail without becoming obsessive. His obviously thorough research into the business and culture of comic strips pays superb dividends as Tim attends a comic strip convention in one of the book’s more memorable and funny chapters. The Funnies may not always be funny, but Lennon’s balanced delivery, his inherent whimsy, and his refusal to brush the darker aspects of the book under the rug gives The Funnies its impressive energy and nuanced psychological strength.

Mark Luce is a writer in Lawrence, Kansas.

I had a roommate in college who used to leave guests doubled over on the floor with a hilarious cultural critique of what he deemed the eight basic plot lines of the Family Circus comic strip. All those laughs came rushing back in sinister spades…

Mystery & SuspenseMystery

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Le Carre begins with a bang: This gun is not a gun.

Or such was Mr. Winser’s determined conviction when the youthful Alix Hoban, European managing director and chief executive of Trans-Finanz Vienna, Petersburg, and Istanbul, introduced a pallid hand into the breast of his Italian blazer and extracted neither a platinum cigarette case nor an engraved business card, but a slim blue-black automatic pistol in mint condition, and pointed it from a distance of six inches at the bridge of Mr. Winser’s beakish but strictly nonviolent nose. This gun does not exist. Le Carre takes us inside Winser’s head while the pistol is held in his face, backward through his life, his sex life, his business life, building empathy with Winser. Horrified, we see the gangsters with Hoban produce a video camera, all for the point of filming Winser’s execution. The gun is, indeed, a gun. But first-rate espionage writing has to be more than bang-bang, shoot-em-up. And there is not much doubt about Le Carre being first-rate. From being smacked in the face with this beginning dramatic flourish, we are then led through the diminuendo of explication, the weaving of the tapestry of this particular world where the hoods make international cell phone calls and film their executions. It is in some senses a new world for Le Carre readers the Georgia mafia meets Tony London merchant banking. But in many ways, it is the world this masterful storyteller has given us for years.

We have a hero: flawed, scarred by life, unlucky in love, and above all, deeply ambivalent about his professional mission. The people he loves often end up dead. And the threat to them drives the hero to shed his ambiguities and step up to the challenge, pistol in hand.

This time our man is Oliver Single, an awkward, overlarge magician, an entertainer of children. He is living the quiet life. Occasionally he drinks to the point of oblivion. He has the air of having been deeply wounded. But there is more to Oliver than the magician lodger. He is really the son of Tiger Single, the tiny, fastidious mogul who heads the House of Single, a merchant banking firm. To the world, Tiger has made his considerable pile by being the bold venture capitalist who knows the ropes in the former Soviet empire. We learn, however, that the secret of Single’s success is better described as laundering and lubricating the flow of funds for the Orlov gang, as colorful a pack of villains as Le Carre ever created.

Young Oliver joins the firm, falls in love, and becomes a traitor to his father’s cause. That much you learn in the first few pages. For the rest of this intriguing, brilliantly plotted story one of Le Carre’s best you have the pleasure of settling down with a couple of Singles.

J.

W. Foster is an attorney in Columbia, South Carolina.

Le who? John Le Carre was born in England in 1931. After attending the universities of Berne and Oxford, he spent five years in the British Foreign Service. He is the author of 17 novels, including Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: A Perfect Spy, The Little Drummer Girl, The Russia House, and The Tailor of Panama. His books have been translated into 25 languages. He lives in England.

Le Carre begins with a bang: This gun is not a gun.

Or such was Mr. Winser's determined conviction when the youthful Alix Hoban, European managing director and chief executive of Trans-Finanz Vienna, Petersburg, and Istanbul, introduced a pallid hand into the…

History

Review

Review by bookpagedev

It is staggering to think how far women’s sports have come in the 1990s. Ten years ago, most sports fans couldn’t name more than a handful of female athletes outside of the occasional Olympic gymnast or figure skater. Now, any woman or, perhaps more importantly, man who reads the sports pages could name any number of players in two women’s professional basketball leagues, and the most well-known soccer player in the U.

S. is Mia Hamm, a member of the national teams which have won not only the Olympics but World Cup competitions.

What may surprise readers (or may only surprise male readers) of Nike Is a Goddess is that women were held back from competing in many sports because sports were seen as unbecoming, unfeminine, or hazardous to women’s presumably delicate physiology. Despite the rather pretentious title, Nike Is a Goddess contains fascinating stories of the evolution of women’s sports, especially in the 20th century. What might make men uncomfortable, and rightly so, is the premise that, in many cases, certain competitions were closed to women because the competitors themselves and/or the public support threatened male competitors and teams in a very real way.

That premise is presented several times, though only in addition to sports history that stands on its own as excellent sports writing. While the familiar names of recent years are present basketball star Rebecca Lobo and skater Tara Lipinski the real intrigue comes from stories like those of Jackie Mitchell.

Mitchell was a 17-year-old baseball phenomenon playing in amateur men’s leagues in Chattanooga, Tennessee, until she was signed to a minor-league contract. In April, 1931, she appeared in an exhibition game against the New York Yankees, striking out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis, baseball’s first commissioner, however, voided Mitchell’s contract, insisting that baseball would be too strenuous a game for women. While the book is presumably aimed at female readers, all fans of sports history would do well to absorb this volume. Women’s sports weren’t invented this decade; they’ve been there the whole time.

Shelton Clark is a reviewer in Nashville, Tennessee.

It is staggering to think how far women's sports have come in the 1990s. Ten years ago, most sports fans couldn't name more than a handful of female athletes outside of the occasional Olympic gymnast or figure skater. Now, any woman or, perhaps more importantly,…

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