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Sedaris returns to the hilarious and absurd

Review by Mark Doyle

David Sedaris’ previous book, a collection of fictional animal stories called Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, may have worried some of his longtime fans. Had the lovable curmudgeon, famous for his sidesplitting essays about his family’s dysfunction and his misspent youth, abandoned memoir for imaginary stories (however funny and bizarre) about talking animals? After he’d hit the big time—best-selling books, sold-out live performances, homes in England and France—had his own life become too comfortable to be funny?

This latest collection of (mostly) autobiographical essays should put any such worries to rest. Although his life is certainly much happier now than when he was hooked on drugs or working as a department store elf, Sedaris still finds plenty of absurdity in the airports, hotels, book tours and vacation-home renovations that now fill his days. Sedaris is the sort of writer who can make standing in line at a coffee shop an occasion for gleeful, vicarious outrage (and in less time than it takes to steam a cappuccino).

As in his previous book, there are plenty of animals here, though none of them talk. Stuffed owls, mangled roosters, melting sea turtles, skewered mice and a graceful kookaburra populate these pages like the inmates of a psychopath’s barnyard. There are other kinds of beasts here as well. There is his father storming, capricious and pantless, through Sedaris’ childhood. There are the despicable, heartless fanatics whom Sedaris imagines and inhabits in the book’s few fictional pieces. And there is Sedaris himself, so candid about his own moral failings that you almost want to hug him and tell him he’s really not so terrible, even if he did once consider displaying a stuffed Pygmy in his living room.

All this is vintage Sedaris: sharp, strange, moving and funny—proof, if any were needed, that success is no barrier to absurdity and that humans are the strangest talking animals of all.

David Sedaris’ previous book, a collection of fictional animal stories called Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, may have worried some of his longtime fans. Had the lovable curmudgeon, famous for his sidesplitting essays about his family’s dysfunction and his misspent youth, abandoned memoir for imaginary stories (however funny and bizarre) about talking animals? After he’d hit the […]
NonfictionMemoir

The secrets a mother kept

Review by Kate Pritchard

If Emma Brockes’ memoir She Left Me the Gun reminds you of Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, don’t be surprised. Both books grapple with a larger-than-life mother whose formative experiences in the harsh landscape of southern Africa turned them somewhat eccentric, even melodramatic. But while Fuller’s mother held on for dear life to their farm in what was then Rhodesia, Brockes’ mother, Paula, fled South Africa as soon as she could manage it and lived the rest of her life in England, raising her daughter in the kind of sleepy suburban security she could only have dreamed of as a child.

Furthermore, as it turns out, Paula wasn’t just escaping the heat, the scorpions or the poisonous racial politics in the country of her birth. She was also leaving behind a brutal past marked by abuse.

Throughout Brockes’ childhood, her mother kept the truth about her family under wraps. It was only after she became very sick with cancer that Paula revealed she had testified against her father at a trial. “Deathbed revelations weren’t something people had,” Brockes writes. “That my mother, who would ring me at work with the newsflash that she’d found the socks she was looking for . . . had managed to keep this from me was extraordinary.” Still, even then, Paula wasn’t entirely forthcoming about the details of the disturbing charges against her father.

Brockes, an only child, felt unmoored after her mother’s death; she thought there was more to Paula’s past than she’d let on, but she also craved a connection with her mother’s family back in South Africa, many of whom she’d never met. Flying to Johannesburg to meet her mother’s siblings and oldest friends, Brockes was seeking some grand revelations, and she was not disappointed. These stories are doled out in bits and pieces, foreshadowed and then fulfilled. Along the way, a remarkable family narrative emerges, one with more than its fair share of darkness. Yet Paula herself is not only a sympathetic figure, but even a triumphant one. The love that her seven younger siblings still feel for her is palpable, and her daughter’s admiration only grows with her deeper understanding of her mother’s past.

She Left Me the Gun illuminates the necessary fictions we create when trying to understand our family history, as well as the relief, and even pride, that comes from knowing the truth of our origins, however sad or strange they may be.

If Emma Brockes’ memoir She Left Me the Gun reminds you of Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, don’t be surprised. Both books grapple with a larger-than-life mother whose formative experiences in the harsh landscape of southern Africa turned them somewhat eccentric, even melodramatic. But while Fuller’s mother held on for dear […]
Nonfiction

An impossible tale of Arctic survival during WWII

Review by Edward Morris

In Frozen in Time, his second recounting of a largely forgotten World War II rescue mission, Mitchell Zuckoff shifts his focus from the steamy jungles of New Guinea—the locale of 2011’s Lost in Shangri-La—to the glacial wilderness of Greenland. Even before America entered the war, it began constructing military bases in Greenland, both to defend the frozen island against possible German invasion and to serve as a way station for ferrying planes from the U.S. to Britain. So much air traffic over such a hostile environment made crashes inevitable and rescue attempts perilous.

On November 5, 1942, a C-53 Skytrooper cargo plane crashed onto a glacier there. But its five-man crew survived the impact. One of the planes dispatched to locate the survivors was a B-17 bomber. It also went down in a snowstorm, leaving nine survivors stranded. Yet another rescue plane, a Grumman Duck, crashed after having transported two of the downed B-17’s crew to safety. These three crashes and their aftermaths form the core of Zuckoff’s account. Drawing on personal letters, recollections and official reports, he spins claustrophobically up-close stories of what it was like to be marooned for weeks and months in subfreezing temperatures with gravely ill comrades, insufficient supplies and dwindling hope.

Early in the book, Zuckoff introduces yet another level of drama. While amassing details for his main story, he encounters a modern-day adventurer who is intent on finding and retrieving the Grumman Duck, now buried under hundreds of feet of ice. Zuckoff joins in, helps finance the project and describes the bumpy course of this high-risk effort.

Astoundingly thorough in his research, Zuckoff not only chronicles the significant actions of dozens of “characters,” but he also probes their individual lives before they went to war, sketches in their personality traits, digs up their photographs and interviews their descendants. Thus, each character stands apart from the others.

Because so much of this narrative takes place against an unvarying backdrop of snow and ice, and because there are no real “villains” to heighten tension, Frozen in Time doesn’t have quite the same expansive, edge-of-your-seat quality that Lost in Shangri-La possesses. Even so, it is an engaging testimony to perseverance, ingenuity and monumental self-sacrifice.

In Frozen in Time, his second recounting of a largely forgotten World War II rescue mission, Mitchell Zuckoff shifts his focus from the steamy jungles of New Guinea—the locale of 2011’s Lost in Shangri-La—to the glacial wilderness of Greenland. Even before America entered the war, it began constructing military bases in Greenland, both to defend […]
Food & Drink

Mixing cocktails with the literati

Review by bookpagedev

Once upon a time, drinking seemed like an author’s duty, an indulgence that defined the literary life. Of course, the era of the innocent cocktail has ended, but the scent of spirits nevertheless wafts through the work of many of our most prized writers. In a toast to the literary giants who turned the consumption of alcohol into an art, author Mark Bailey and artist Edward Hemingway have produced one of the most appealing gift books of the season, Hemingway and Bailey’s Bartending Guide to Great American Writers. Featuring famous imbibers such as William Faulkner, James Jones, Sinclair Lewis, Dorothy Parker, and, of course, Ernest Hemingway, the guide includes recipes for each author’s cocktail of choice, as well as hard-to-top tales of intoxication and classic drinking quotes ( I have a martini, the poet Anne Sexton once said, and I feel, once more, real. ). Hemingway, grandson of Papa and an accomplished illustrator, contributed uncannily accurate author caricatures to the book, while Bailey rounded up the material, spotlighting 43 writers and 43 different drinks. Pick your poison, dear reader, and get mixing.

Once upon a time, drinking seemed like an author’s duty, an indulgence that defined the literary life. Of course, the era of the innocent cocktail has ended, but the scent of spirits nevertheless wafts through the work of many of our most prized writers. In a toast to the literary giants who turned the consumption […]
NonfictionCrafts, Hobbies & Home

All over the maps

Review by bookpagedev

For American history buffs, Derek Hayes’ The Historical Atlas of the United States is a dream come true: It’s a detailed pictorial history of America’s ever-evolving political and cultural byways and boundaries. This curious and, at the same time, amazingly ambitious narrative starts out with reproductions of early American maps in which the Eastern states are well delineated, while the West is uncharted desert. It marches on through America’s growth spurts, reproducing early road and interstate maps, Cold War maps and the graphics used to represent Hurricane Katrina. Hayes knows this medium well, having previously written atlases of the Pacific Northwest, Canada and the Artic. Here he draws on more than 500 maps so even readers who found their minds wandering during history classes will find this book of interest, though they might get sidetracked by some of the more whimsical features. For example, one map, reproduced from the Internet shortly after the 2004 presidential election, divides North America into The United States of Canada (i.e. Canada and those states that voted for John Kerry) and Jesusland, those states that went to George W. Bush.

For American history buffs, Derek Hayes’ The Historical Atlas of the United States is a dream come true: It’s a detailed pictorial history of America’s ever-evolving political and cultural byways and boundaries. This curious and, at the same time, amazingly ambitious narrative starts out with reproductions of early American maps in which the Eastern states […]
NonfictionCrafts, Hobbies & Home

Stories in pictures

Review by bookpagedev

Reuters news agency has captured the first six years of the 21st century in Reuters: The State of the World, a series of captioned photos that span modern life from the new millennium celebrations through the terrorist attacks and on to recent Academy Awards ceremonies. The section that documents our century’s most formidable tragedies the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the destruction of New Orleans, fanatical attacks on New York and Madrid will be, for many readers, the book’s most important contribution as those events seem largely to shape the new era. The State of the World also spotlights world religions, emerging technologies, recent political conflicts and popular culture. For some, the book’s most powerful images may be those that ultimately need no interpretation: Pope John Paul II releasing a dove; a Bavarian church surrounded by satellite dishes nearly as high as its onion dome; a rabbi looking at a Hebrew memorial defaced by a swastika; a sneakered foot running down a street chased by a frothing bull; Julia Roberts smiling. A related website (www.stateoftheworld.reuters.com) features slideshows of the book’s images and profiles of the 227 photojournalists who took them.

Reuters news agency has captured the first six years of the 21st century in Reuters: The State of the World, a series of captioned photos that span modern life from the new millennium celebrations through the terrorist attacks and on to recent Academy Awards ceremonies. The section that documents our century’s most formidable tragedies the […]

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