Archive for the ‘Non-Fiction’ Category
One French critic called it “an inartistic … scaffolding of crossbars and angled iron” with a “hideously unfinished” appearance. Another denounced it as an “odious column of bolted metal.” Hard as it is to believe, the 1,000-foot Eiffel Tower–built as the centerpiece of Paris’ 1889 Exposition Universelle–was considerably less appreciated at the time of its raising than it is nowadays.
In her entertaining new history, Eiffel’s Tower (Viking, $27.95), Jill Jonnes recounts the myriad difficulties that engineer Gustave Eiffel faced in finishing his monumental erection. But she also offers a three-ring circus of contemporaneous characters. Prominent among those is Buffalo Bill Cody, who brought his Wild West Show–complete with stampeding Indians and sharpshooter Annie Oakley–to the Paris world’s fair at the start of what would be a highly profitable European tour. Appearing here, too, is bad-boy newspaper publisher James Gordon Bennett Jr., who lorded over what had been his father’s New York Herald, while also establishing a Paris edition of that broadsheet, which promoted the ’89 expo–and eventually became part of today’s International Herald Tribune. Further animating this volume’s narrative are artists (including the tortured Vincent van Gogh and the mercurial James McNeill Whistler), and inventor extraordinaire Thomas Edison, who delighted Parisian dignitaries with his new talking phonographs.
Jonnes notes here, as well, that the Paris fair was important in educating the French about their colonial empire’s foreign acquisitions. Quoting from one newspaper account, she writes that “Fairgoers were lured by the ‘smell of Oriental spices and north African couscous, the sound of Senegalese tom-toms, Polynesian flutes and Annamite [Vietnamese] gongs, the sight of Moslem minarets and Cambodian temples. In the bazaars of the large Algerian and Tunisian pavilions craftsmen fashioned jewelry, finely tooled leather and brightly colored tapestries.’” Amid such exotic enticements, it’s a wonder that anyone found time to scale Eiffel’s tower–then the tallest manmade structure in the world. ~ Jeff Pierce
After 13 years as a pastry chef at the legendary Chez Panisse and several more years as a cook book author specializing in the sweet endings of a meal, David Lebovitz needed a radical change. He “shook the etch-a-sketch” of his life and moved to Paris.The Sweet Life in Paris is an account of his experiences as a resident, not a tourist, as he makes his way through the fish markets, chocolate shops and department stores of this legendary city. His humorous, mini-essays about the challenges of living in a foreign culture are full of love and goodwill even when complaining how Parisians are aggressive about cutting in line. He attempts to be understanding when faced with the daunting challenge of finding shoelaces, with a myriad of sizes on display except the necessary 110 centimeter laces. And he is baffled when clerks demand exact change, feigning an absence of the crucial centimes to return. At the end of each essay he includes a recipe for something delicious – sweet or savory. Each recipe sounded more scrumptious than the last. I kept thinking, “That’s not so hard, even I could make that” as I flagged recipes that seemed especially mouthwatering like “Carnitas” – caramelized pork, or Chocolate Macaroons. My friends, true chocoholics, loved the Chocolate Macaroons, small morsels of almond chocolate meringue filled with an intense chocolate filling. Each recipe has a short intro that gives some insight into why David includes it in his book. He provides cooking tips developed through testing the recipes in his miniscule apartment kitchen with counter-tops that are too high and storage space that is practically non-existent. So, if you can’t make it to Paris soon, immerse yourself in this book. Whip up one of his savory or sweet recipes, have some friends over (or not), close your eyes and imagine you are part of the sweet life of Paris. ~Gretchen Echols
Chilling is the only word for Richard Flanagan’s impeccably written The Unknown Terrorist (Grove $14.00). Gina Davies, known as “the Doll” at the Chairman’s Lounge where she is employed as a pole dancer is fixated on saving enough money to put a down payment on an apartment. She seeks to wipe out her westie trash roots by buying designer label everything. Mardi Gras Saturday night in Sydney, she goes out into the street and dances with a stranger who invites her back to his apartment. When she wakes up in the morning he is gone. Sipping coffee at the cafe next door, she watches black clad police descend on the neighborhood, surrounding the building she has just exited. Later, at home, she sees news of the police raid including what is referred to as security camera footage of the terrorist suspect in an attempted bombing, and his unknown female accomplice. It is her. For the next five days she is on the run as the security forces and media twist every aspect of her life to fit their needs for justification and self promotion. As her understanding of the way of the world and her place in it darken, so does her resolution as to what she must do. It is Australia, but it could be anywhere in the post 9/11 culture of fear. ~ Marla Vandewater
Crooked lawmen, political strivers, grafters and gamblers, low dives and criminal hijinks–Satan’s Circus (Three Rivers Press $15.95) has those attractions and more, all centered around the tale of the only police officer in U.S. history to be executed for murder. British writer Mike Dash’s record of the rise and fall of Charley Becker, a handsome, German-descended New York City cop, is a colorful, captivating lesson in dishonor among thieves. Despite being trusted by his superiors and given responsibility for taming vice in early 1900s Manhattan, Becker was living a double life as the head of a widespread extortion racket. He thought himself invulnerable. But the murder of a casino owner who’d threatened to expose Becker made this decorated cop a target of ambitious journalists and prosecutors. Turned on by fellow brigands, and despite his wife’s efforts to clear him of wrongdoing, Becker wound up paying with his life for Gotham’s rank corruption. ~ Jeff Pierce
The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York, by Matthew Goodman (Basic Books $26.00)
It’s tempting to think that people of the 21st century are too worldly to be taken in by the sort of hoaxes that were perpetrated 100 or 200 years ago. But then you hear about people who are convinced that the Apollo 11 astronauts didn’t really walk on Earth’s moon, but simply kicked up dust on a Hollywood stage set. And suddenly the capacity for men and women to be buffaloed doesn’t look so related to an earlier day. Still, the rich deception pulled off by editor Richard Adams Locke and his New York Sun “penny paper” in 1835 depended on their era’s inhabitants being less knowledgeable about science and more easily wowed by pseudo-scientific discoveries. To drum up attention, the Sun published a series of articles supposedly proving the existence of life on the moon. And not just any life, but such exotica as walking beavers, unicorns, peculiar bearlike creatures, and 4-foot-tall “man-bats.” For several weeks, the “Great Moon Hoax” captured international attention and brought acclaim (and income) to the young, struggling Sun. Renowned showman P.T. Barnum later claimed that the paper peddled $25,000 worth of moon-hoax paraphernalia to gullible readers. Marshaling ample (and then some) trivia and stories related to this fraud, New York in the 1830s, and people who were affected in some way by Locke’s bunkum (including Edgar Allan Poe, who claimed that the Sun had plagiarized his fiction), author Goodman delivers a remarkable story of a more innocent America and the sort of journalism that turned its residents into newspaper followers. - Jeff Pierce
Malcolm Gladwell, former Washington Post science reporter turned New Yorker staff writer, scored big with his first two non-fiction books, The Tipping Point and Blink, both of which plumbed aspects of human behavior. Outliers: The Story of Success (Little, Brown, $27.99) returns to that same field, but looks for a slightly different crop. This time, he’s interested in finding out what distinguishes people “who do something special with their lives” from everyone else. In other words, he’s trying to suss out whether intelligence, experience, or background — or a combination of all three — can be credited with helping some people to succeed while others do not. It sounds like a simple scenario, but the idiosyncratically minded Gladwell never looks for simple answers. Instead, he heads off in a dozen divergent intellectual directions, analyzing the childhood of Microsoft’s Bill Gates, examining why some soccer players excel and why Asians are good at mathematics, and identifying the factors that led to the Beatles becoming the world’s greatest rock band. Even knowing why some people excelled in the past, though, may not be sufficient; Gladwell contends that mastering a field in the 21st century could involve less individual, isolated genius than wise collaboration and diligence. As Gladwell has said before, “A scientific genius is not a person who does what no one else can do; he or she is someone who does what it takes many others to do.” — Jeff Pierce
Brash but beautiful, an assiduous rules-breaker known for smoking in public and speaking her mind, Alice Longworth, the oldest child of President Theodore Roosevelt, turned a desire to gain her father’s attention into a determination to influence politcians for most of the 20th century. She wed a Republican congressman from Ohio, who went on to become Speaker of the House and cheat on their marriage (which led Alice to bear a child with renowned Sen. William Borah of Idaho). A great one for cross-party manipulations, she undermined Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations and denounced her cousin Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. But she later ditched the GOP and voted for John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, only to go on and enourage Richard Nixon’s second run for the presidency. A vigorous gossip, Alice Longworth was famous for the adage, “If you haven’t anything nice to say, come sit by me.” Stacy A. Cordery captures her in all her defiant finery in Alice: Alice Roosevelt Longworth, from White House Princess to Washington Power Broker (Viking $32.95) ~ Jeff Pierce
