Need For reads

Fiction Off the grid THE TERRANAUTS T. C. Boyle 508 pp. Harper Collins Reviewed by Marty Carlock Can a self-sustaining biosphere be created on, say, Mars to enable human beings to live on an alien planet? Theorists think so. A couple of decades ago an attempt to perform this experiment actually took place in the Arizona desert; it was called Biosphere2. Although a crew stayed inside for two years, they cheated on several crucial levels, such as importing outside oxygen. T. Coraghessan Boyle, one of our more prolific and entertaining contemporary novelists, satirizes the experiment in The Terranauts . In his fecund imagination, another mission is undertaken (with snide references to the actual, failed one). Boyle has no problem visualizing the probabilities as eight “Terranauts” attempt to survive for two years in an artificial environment. E2 (E1 is the actual Earth, outside) is carefully planned: Its three acres comprise five biomes – rain forest, ocean, desert, savanna and marsh. The...

Fiction Born in Vietnam, made in America THE REFUGEES By Viet Thanh Nguyen 224 pp. Grove Press Reviewed by Sarah Corbett Morgan The Refugees is an excellent collection of short stories Viet Thanh Nguyen wrote before his 2015 Pulitzer-prize winning novel, The Sympathizer . All eight stories were previously published in lit magazines between 2007 and 2011.  Nguyen writes with compassion about people caught in the middle.  We may encounter them when we get our nails done or shop in small Asian specialty markets. They are the people who live their lives half in one culture and half in another.  He knows what it is to be an outsider and yet a part of a new country. In 1975 he and his family were part of the mass exodus of some two million refugees fleeing Vietnam when communists took control of the country. He describes himself as “born in Vietnam and made in America.”  An epigraph in the front of the book quotes Roberto Bolaño’s Antwerp : “I wrote this book for the ghos...

Nonfiction Glad to get back home again THE SELECTED LETTERS OF LAURA INGALLS WILDER Edited by William Anderson 379 pp. HarperCollins Reviewed by Diane Diekman “The Selected Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder is the final collection of unpublished writing from the author of the Little House books,” writes editor William Anderson in the introduction. “There no longer remains a well of her words left to print.” This book consists of excerpts of more than 400 letters written by Laura Ingalls Wilder over six decades. Anderson, author of Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Biography (1992), collected and edited them. The letters are grouped into six chapters, with titles such as “The Farmer’s Wife (1894-1920)” and “Star of the Children’s Department (1937-1943).” Chronologically presented, they sometimes are preceded by explanatory notes from the editor. Other than correcting spelling and erroneous dates, Anderson says the letters “appear in this book essentially as she wrote them, leaving intact occasion...

Nonfiction A grand Victorian, nearly forgotten EVELYN DOVE Britain’s Black Cabaret Queen By Stephen Bourne 160 pp. Jacaranda Books Reviewed by Sala Wyman Biographies of performing artists are my guilty pleasure. I enjoy stories that that carry me along the roads leading to an artist’s career. And perhaps because I've been a performer myself, stories about performers remind me of the grit it takes to make and leave a mark in the world. Those who make it and are remembered must be very , very tough and resilient. They appear to have a particular kind of toughness. I call it the “killer instinct.”` In Stephen Bourne’s Evelyn Dove, Britain’s Black Cabaret Queen , he gives a portrait of an artist who apparently did not have that instinct. More interesting, however, and even more importantly, he documents the growth of the black theater movement in Europe and the forgotten role that Evelyn Dove played in that movement. I expected Bourne’s portrait of Dove to be linear, with a beginning...

Nonfiction Feminine until the fighting starts SHADOW WARRIORS OF WORLD WAR II: The Daring Women of the OSS and SOE By Gordon Thomas and Greg Lewis 304 pp. Chicago Review Press Reviewed by Diane Diekman During World War II, an underground army of spies and saboteurs was organized and controlled by Great Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE), along with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in the United States. Women, who have been “shadow warriors” in many wars, were recruited for this effort. Shadow Warriors of World War II: the Daring Women of the OSS and SOE tells the story of some of these courageous operatives and their fates. Authors Gordon Thomas and Greg Lewis wanted to answer these questions: “How was intelligence handled in one of the greatest and most terrible events in history, World War II? Who were the men who formed the clandestine forces and realized women should be among their most important foot soldiers? And who were the women they chose?” Prime Minister Win...

Fiction Surfing, hickies, and a transplant THE HEART By Maylis de Kerangal Translated by Sam Taylor 242 pp. Farrar, Straus and Giroux Reviewed by Sue Ellis A bestseller in France, Maylis de Kerangal’s The Heart is a fictionalized account of a heart transplant. Readers meet the donor first, twenty-year-old Simon Limbres, who rises from his warm bed pre-dawn to surf a winter sea with two buddies. It’s not the cold that kills him, not a surfing accident, but one of his friends, the driver who, warmed by their van’s heater on the way home, falls asleep at the wheel.  The first few chapters are intense enough that they can almost be swallowed whole, partly due to the shock of a young, healthy man’s death, and partly due to the discovery of the author’s stunning prose. The language she employs (which was capably translated to English by Sam Taylor) is at once concise and impossibly descriptive, and so poetically rendered that it touches a chord that perhaps is not expected. Here’s an ex...

Fiction Janitor for the multiverse DEPARTMENT ZERO By Paul Crilley 301 pp. Pyr Books Reviewed by Eric Petersen Scottish author Paul Crilley, best known as a children’s book writer, is back with another novel geared toward adult readers. Have you ever wondered what it would be like if H.P. Lovecraft and Douglas Adams had collaborated on a novel? Well, now you can find out. When asked what he does for a living, Harry Priest, a sad-sack Englishman living in Los Angeles, (the author is a Scotsman who lives in South Africa) says that the polite term for his job is “biohazard remediation.” Another term for it is “crime and trauma scene decontamination.” In other words, Harry is a 40-year-old janitor who cleans up crime and accident scenes after the police have done their work. He works for a company called LA Cleaners. His dim-bulb partner, Jorge, is the owner’s son. Harry’s ex-wife Megan left him a while ago, disgusted by his lack of ambition. His only pleasure in life is calling his daught...

Nonfiction
 Se eking perfection LOST SECRETS OF MASTER MUSICIANS
 A Window Into Genius 
 By David Jacobson
 449 pp. SFIM Books Reviewed by Alan Goodman This is a most curious book. Indeed, the author, David Jacobson, is the founder and the director of a music school, the San Francisco Institute of Music. His life, as described in some careful detail, has been spent in a vigorous and determined pursuit of violin perfection. The ultimate goal? Becoming a soloist, playing like past masters such as Heifetz, Millstein and Horowitz.  Mr. Jacobson, a man who has obviously given thorough consideration for the several basic disciplines of music, appears to hold much of the current state of music in various degrees of contempt.  The writing is clear, straightforward, and engaging. The book presents unvarnished opinion on the subject of classical music – the state of performance, pedagogy, the role of soloists, orchestral playing, auditioning, the necessity for conductors, technical thou...

Nonfiction Arbitrary lines in the sand PRISONERS OF GEOGRAPHY: Ten Maps that Explain Everything About the World By Tim Marshall 305 pp. Scribner Reviewed by Marty Carlock Prisoners of Geography is a brief and opinionated course in geopolitics. Filled as it is with an intimidating amount of information, the fact that it finds itself on the best-seller list may have a lot to do with its clever title. Yet author Tim Marshall makes a case for his theme: that the geographical limitations of each nation and/or continent dictate its ambitions, its achievements, even its wealth.  How does Marshall know so much about everything in the world? As a foreign correspondent for British television, he has reported from 30 countries, including six war zones. His expertise extends across four continents, omitting Antarctica because of the Antarctic Treaty, which declares it an international scientific preserve where military activity is banned. (He omits Australia, too.) However, he analyzes the ne...

Fiction Dead characters walking THE BIG GREEN TENT By Ludmila Ulitskaya, translated by Polly Gannon 579 pp. Picador  Reviewed by Marty Carlock It appears to me that American fiction writers work to please their readers, while Europeans write to please critics. How else to explain the purple praise lavished on The Big Green Tent , a tome by “one of Russia’s most famous writers,” “a must-read,” “Compelling, addictive reading,” “never boring,” and “As grand, solid and impressively all-encompassing as the title implies”? List me among the ignorati: I can agree only with the first and last of these plugs. For 400 of its almost 600 pages I had to beat myself up to keep reading. Ulitskaya whimsically pursues a kind of anti-narrative, telling a character’s story to its end, killing him or her off – then in the next chapter or so: What? Here’s Olga or Ilya again, young and lusty, living another piece of his/her life. This is a lazy way to write. It relieves the author of the tedium of makin...