(Almost) Weekly Reader

[image error]

This week on my review-driven 'gotta read'  (or re-read in one case) list:

My heart raced when I read Pamela Miller's Star Tribune review of Not at All What One Is Used To: The Life and Times of Isabella Gardner by Marian Janssen. According to the review, "Gardner was fascinated by Gardner, and wondered why such a gifted poet had sunk into oblivion.

The answers were complicated, perhaps best explained by the subordinate female role predominant in midcentury America. Gardner felt that it was more important to love and serve than it was to write and publish; she advanced the careers of many poets while subjugating her own. Oscar Williams, her era's chief anthologist, blithely failed to include her in his collections, which led to her obscurity."

Also in the Star-Tribune (which always has a wonderful and varied book review section) is Laura C.J. Owen's review of a fascinating-sounding book, Cate Kennedy's debut novel, The World Beneath:

"This debut novel about an estranged father and daughter's trek through the Tasmanian outback is well observed and often very funny . . . The novel is painfully pointed in its satire of well-meaning progressives whose grand plans to change the world have devolved into passive-aggressive jabs at each other. Seeing each other for the first time in years,  (formerly married) Rich and Sandy immediately engage in environmental one-upmanship. "

Brett Lott writes an exquisite review in The Boston Globe of what sounds like an extraordinary book: Townie: A Memoir:

"Much of the early going in the book is given over to Dubus's single-minded pursuit of the chiseled physique and the administering of the fist to the face. But after a few too many turns with the gratifying rush of stoving in some deserving punk's ribs with the steel toes of his boots, Dubus begins to connect his actions to his father's absence. It is, we find, this lack of a father — no matter how beloved a writer he might have been to the literary world — that feeds the poisonous dynamo Dubus becomes on the streets of Haverhill."

From the 'few years past' department, Ligaya Mishan's NYT review of a favorite book by a favorite writer: Brian Morton's, Breakable You (which I think I'm ready to re-read.)

"At 63, Adam is obsessed not with sex but death; he even wonders if his libido (boosted by Viagra) is just "a desire to assert the rights of the living over the rights of the dead." He can barely control his bile when forced to return to his former haunts on the Upper West Side, decrying "the world of late-night conversations about Marx and Freud in homey little delicatessens of dubious cleanliness, the world that had seemed to be his destined burial ground." So it's perhaps not surprising that his moral reckoning comes in the form of a ghost — a dead rival whose brilliant posthumous manuscript threatens to nullify Adam's literary career."

From NPR, I was drawn to the excerpt, audio interview, and review of Clarence Lusane's Black History of the White House:

"For many Americans, the White House stands as a symbol of liberty and justice. But its gleaming facade hides harsh realities, from the slaves who built the home to the presidents who lived there and shaped the country's racial history, often for the worse. In The Black History of the White House, Clarence Lusane traces the path of race relations in America by telling a very specific history — the stories of those African-Americans who built, worked at and visited the White House.

"Most of us grew up learning history, and we learned about George Washington and the cherry tree and all of that," Lusane tells NPR's Mary Louise Kelly, "but everything else was kind of a blur." But when you do the research, he says, you see how slavery "really shaped the first third of the country's history, and certainly impacted the White House and the occupants of the White House."