Archive for June, 2009

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

Philip Kerr set out to pen a trilogy about World War II-era Berlin cop turned private eye Bernie Gunther, beginning with March Violets (1989). But he’s now up to five volumes. In the newest, A Quiet Flame (Putnam, $26.95), Gunther poses as a Nazi war criminal and escapes to Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1950. Everywhere he goes in South America’s most European city, he seems to come across some former Hitler henchman, now living behind an assumed name and innocent occupation, benefiting from President Juan Perón’s interest in permanently retired Nazis — and their ill-gotten gains. Gunther might have liked to disappear, too. But instead he’s called on by the local chief of police, who knows something of his sordid background, to help investigate the gruesome slaying of a young girl — a case that bears similarities to another, unsolved homicide that Gunther worked on during his police days. The story offers lots of flashbacks, placing a more hopeful Gunther in the wild Berlin of 1932, where he delves into the “lust murder” of Anita Schwarz, a disabled part-time prostitute. Kerr does an excellent job of bringing to life such characters as Perón and his wife, Eva, as well as Adolf Eichmann and Otto Skorzeny. And he mixes them with winning fictional figures, notably Anna Yagubsky, a fetching young Jewish woman who wants the older Gunther’s help in finding her lost relatives, and in return assists him in the Schwarz probe, no matter the dangers involved — or the bed sheets they must tangle along the way. Questions about Argentina’s collaboration with the Nazis and its anti-Semitism only add further spice to A Quiet Flame. There are just enough loose ends in the last chapter to suggest that Kerr has a sixth Bernie Gunther book in the works. Thank goodness. ~ Jeff Pierce

Wartime Berlin, a city where the police answer to the Gestapo, tension is everywhere, and ordinary people struggle to survive is the setting for Hans Fallada’s novel Every Man Dies Alone. Written in 1947 and based on real events, this novel is translated into English for the first time. It opens with the delivery to Anna and Otto Quangel notification of the death of their son in the invasion of France. A quiet working class couple who keep to themselves, they share a building with a retired judge, a Nazi party family, an opportunistic petty criminal and an elderly Jewish woman. Grief over their son’s death, inspires them to begin a campaign of writing anti-Hitler postcards, dropping them in buildings around the city. They envision the rising of the common people against Nazi control of their lives as the cards are passed from hand to hand, inspiring discussion and dissent. In reality the cards are immediately turned in to the police, inspiring only terror in the hapless individuals who pick them up. In the dance of cruelty, manipulation, conspiracy and betrayal surrounding them, they doggedly continue to drop their postcards. United and fearless, convinced the war will be over soon and life will be better, they grow closer as the months go by. The police inspector in charge of their case is initially amused. As time passes Gestapo pressure increases, amusement turns to frustration and fear. Well written, following multiple intersecting storylines giving a taste of life in wartime Berlin, this is a can’t put down novel. ~Marla Vandewater

Seattle author, Erica Bauermeister’s first novel The School of Essential Ingredients (Putnam $24.95) is pure delight. It tells the story of eight students who gather each week for a cooking lesson from Lillian, a world-class chef who needs no lists and no recipes. For her, smells are “what printed words are for others, something alive that grew and changed.” She tells her students they will learn what they need to. With each lesson, friendships form, memories are evoked, and the characters learn as much about life as they do food. The writing is as sensual and satisfying as a good, slow meal. As Lillian says, the most essential ingredient of all is time -”the weeks it takes to ripen a tomato, the years to grow a fig tree. And every meal you cook is time out of your day – but you all know that”. Read this book on a Sunday afternoon, then create a pot of soup!  ~Carol Santoro

In The Tsar’s Dwarf, by Peter Fogtdal, Sorine is a middle aged dwarf hired by the court of Danish King Frederick to jump out of a cake to entertain visiting Tsar Peter the Great. The next thing she knows she has been given to the Tsar, a collector of human oddities. In Russia, despite various demeaning situations, she continually asserts her intelligence and wit while retaining her dignity as a human being. Through her eyes we see life at the Russian court, in an Orthodox religious cloister, as a member of the Tsar’s museum of human curiosities and in the family of a wealthy Polish merchant. Elegant crystalline prose creates a multi-layered narrative as we follow Sorine on her journey. She is a captivating spit-fire of a woman, forging a life for herself in a hostile world. ~ Gretchen Echols

In The Niagara River Kay Ryan, our poet laureate for 2008-2009, writes brief, dense poems that are deceptively easy to read. The spare language is packed with meanings that imply greater things. Each short line vaults the reader forward by miles and results in arriving that much closer to the inarticulate. Her short poems contain many surprises in both internal and slant kinds of rhyme combined with exact rhyme. Ryan describes poetry as an intensely personal experience for both the writer and the reader. “The poem is operating so deeply in you that it is the most special kind of reading.” This is a slim volume holding gems of language, wit and wisdom that holds firm with many readings. ~ Gretchen Echols
“The poem is a raid on the inarticulate.” ~T.S. Eliot

Author Edwards spent 33 years on his manuscript, beginning when he was still a young English teacher in 1974. Such labors of love either turn out to be masterpieces of development or messes of over-thinking. Fortunately, The Little Book (Dutton $25.95) is one of the former. It’s part of a subgenre of unlikely time-travel tales, in which the “how” of transportation through the years is pretty much ignored in favor of appreciating the consequences of the journey. In Edwards’ story, teenage baseball star-turned-California rock musician Stan “Wheeler” Burden, attacked by an unknown assailant in 1988 San Francisco, tumbles backward to 1897 Vienna. There, he must adapt as best he can, striking up the most unlikely association with Sigmund Freud, and meeting his own father — another victim of this time dislocation — as well as his grandparents. In addition to discovering more about his father’s life and that of a former mentor, Burden helps fill out a vivid picture of Vienna before World War I, when it was still considered the intellectual capital of Europe. He must also contend with one moralistic dilemma after another, as he falls in love with a woman from his future and considers the opportunity of killing Adolf Hitler while he’s still a boy. The author obviously had fun contriving the lengthy arc of circumstances that will lead to Burden’s attack in 1988, but he shows even more delight in re-creating a long-ago and ostensibly promising era. If it took Edwards 33 years to write The Little Book, I fear we won’t see another work of fiction from him. Thank goodness his first novel is so memorable. – Jeff Pierce

Come to Moscow. It will be fun. With these words Fin entices her gay half brother Darcy. One year older, Fin has always held an uneasy allure. It is February 1984, In Russia homosexuals are persecuted. His passport is confiscated. Inexplicable encounters with men and Fin’s odd behavior pull him in different directions as over the course of a week his life goes wildly out of control. Part cold war thriller, part family drama, STRAY DOG WINTER (Macadam Cage $24.00) by David Francis will get your heart pounding. ~ Marla Vandewater

When crime novelist Mickey Spillane died in 2006, he left behind five unfinished novels featuring his hardest of hard-boiled private eyes, Mike Hammer. He stipulated that they should go to his friend, fellow writer, and occasional collaborator Max Allan Collins. Collins is now completing and publishing those books in Spillane’s memory. The first came out this fall: The Goliath Bone (Harcourt, $23), which is, chronologically speaking, the last Hammer, bringing the aging New York City gumshoe’s career to a fitting (and fittingly violent) close. While Hammer stories are often timeless, this one is tied firmly to the post-September 11 world. It builds around the discovery, in Israel’s Valley of Elah, of an oversized thigh bone said to be have once belonged to Goliath, the legendary Philistine giant felled by a slingshot-wielding David. The two young people who found this artifact are now threatened in Manhattan by both al-Qaeda terrorists and Israeli extremists, so they turn to Hammer for protection. In short order, Hammer and his secretary turned fiancée, Velda Sterling, are mixing it up with international assassins, federal agents, archaeologists, Broadway showmen, and at least one retired cop who’s having a hard time staying out of trouble. The Goliath Bone doesn’t send Hammer in a new direction, or cause one to rethink Spillane’s series as a whole. It’s a solid capper to Hammer’s professional arc, though, and a valuable reminder of this series’ strengths — fast action, a fully realized protagonist, and mayhem not inconsistent with Hammer’s urban jungle milieu and the dangers of his assignments. — Jeff Pierce

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