Archive for May, 2009

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 lives of Edward S. Curtis a photographer of western landscapes and American Indians, and the fictional character Marianne Wiggins, are intertwined in Wiggins’ newest novel The Shadow Catcher (Simon and Schuster $15.00). It begins with an intriguing scene: Wiggins is “pitching” her book on Edward Curtis to some Hollywood producers. They see a rugged, inventive American who was devoted to photographing his subjects. But Wiggins reveals that his photos were “set-ups” and he routinely endangered the welfare of his family in pursuit of his career. After the meeting Wiggins receives a call that her father is dying in a hospital in Las Vegas. The catch is that her father has been dead for years. Her search for the dying man’s identity reveals even more fascinating and contradictory details of Curtis’ life. There are times when the two stories don’t seem to mesh but the author deftly pulls them together for a very satisfying ending. I couldn’t put this one down. ~ Carol Santoro

Hannah West in Deep Water by Linda Johns
(Puffin $5.99)
Hannah is an intelligent, observant and independent 12 year old. Her mother is a professional house sitter. Care taking a Portage Bay houseboat and resident dog has fabulous possibilities, including a part in a film shot on the dock. However, something funny is going on with the water, and Hannah is determined to find out what. The Seattle setting of this fun series adds to the interest

Among the Hidden by Margaret Peterson Haddix
(Aladdin $6.99)
Luke Garner is an illegal third child in a world where only two are allowed per family. Threat of exposure means a life lived in an attic room, his only view of the world through a narrow crack in the wall. Bored, restless and alone, one day he sees another third child in a neighbors house. He risks everything to make contact. His life is changed forever. Well written, exciting and thought provoking.
~Marla Vandewater

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

It seems that Russian investigating magistrate Porfiry Petrovich pursued other lawbreakers, following the deranged-student case described so well by Fyodor Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment (1866). In The Gentle Axe, (Penguin $14.00) British author R.N. Morris sends Porfiry out to untangle the apparent murder-suicide of a burly groundskeeper and a dwarf translator, found in a St. Petersburg park by a rather light-fingered former prostitute. It doesn’t take long for the Columbo-ish sleuth to link these horrors to a dreary whorehouse, a pornography ring, and a starving lawyer-wannabe–and incite resistance from his superiors. Morris’ delving into the squalid corners of tsarist Russia, as much as his quirky players, makes this an absorbing read. ~ Jeff Pierce

I just finished All About Lulu (Soft Skull Press $14.95) and can’t stop grinning. Jonathan Evison’s quirky cast of characters will quickly charm you. The protagonist, William MIller, is a vegetarian nerd in a family of failed bodybuilders (where meat eating reigns supreme). He’s searching for his place in the world when his new stepsister Lulu appears and life turns inside out. Dealing with his obsession leads him to discover the entrepreneurial challenges of selling hot dogs and his talent as a late night radio DJ. Complete with offbeat humor, philosophy and above all, heart, this book has a high place on my recommended reading list. ~Carol Santoro

Many of the stories in Ben Fountain’s Brief Encounters with Che Guevara (HarperCollins $13.95) are set in the world’s most impoverished and crime-ridden countries: Haiti, Sierra Leone, Colombia and Myanmar. The protagonists face moral challenges–sometimes with disastrous, but often with humorous results. In “Near-Extinct Birds of the Central Cordillera,” a graduate student studying birds in Colombia is taken hostage by revolutionaries. He is sympathetic to their cause, but when their goals are corrupted by big business his objections lead to an ironic and darkly amusing conclusion. My favorite story, “Bouki and the Cocaine,” reveals the creative efforts of some Haitian fishermen to sabotage a drug-smuggling operation. The stories in Fountain’s first collection are so substantial and satisfying, they often seem more like novellas. ~ Carol Santoro