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--> Nonfiction We smiled and drank the Pouilly-Fruisse SLOUCHING TOWARDS BETHLEHEM By Joan Didion 354 pp. Picador Modern Classics Reviewed by Sue Ellis In Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion has amassed a memorable collection of essays formerly published during the turbulent 1960s and early 70s. Born in Sacramento, California, Didion graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1956 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English. During her senior year, she won first place in an essay contest sponsored by Vogue , and subsequently went on to work for them for the next several years, moving from her home in Sacramento to New York City. From there she married, moved back to Sacramento and began writing essays for some of the most successful publications of the time, including The New York Times , Holiday , The American Scholar , Vogue , and The Saturday Evening Post . Sharply observant, she was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time and the right cred...

Nonfiction To learn, go teach THE MOUNTAINS IN ART HISTORY Edited by Peter Mark, Peter Helman, and Penny Snyder 132 pp. Wesleyan University Press Reviewed by Sue Ellis This group of essays takes a scholarly look at why we find mountains inspirational. We like to contemplate them, hike their trails, crest their summits and ski down their slopes. We feel God’s presence in a towering peak or a breathtaking drop in elevation. Some 18 th century writers/philosophers felt that the word, “sublime” seemed the perfect adjective to describe so majestic a vision. Little wonder then, that artists are drawn to capture them on canvas or through other artistic mediums. Each essay, by Wesleyan University students, contains one student’s unique perspective on a period in time or a particular artist chosen for his/her contribution to mountain art. The diversity of the essays is wide-ranging. In “Arnold Fanck and German Bergfilm,” by Jackson Sabes, we learn of Dr. Arnold Frank (1889-1974), a German film...

Fiction
 Crime is how this city works BY GASLIGHT 
By Steven Price 
731 pp. Picador
 Reviewed by Sue Ellis By Gaslight is a masterpiece of fiction that imagines an event in the life of American detective Allen Pinkerton. When his father (the famous William Pinkerton) dies, Allen feels duty-bound to hunt down a man his father had been unsuccessful in finding. Young Edward Shade had been taken under the wing of the elder Pinkerton during the Civil War and trained as an operative under his command. Shade disappeared while on assignment. Using his father’s file on the subject, Allen leaves Chicago bound for London to contact agents employed by his abolitionist father some twenty years earlier, a former slave couple he’d helped to freedom. Their assignment: follow a London lead to Edward Shade. The setting is beautifully surreal, 1800’s London at her sooty and melancholy best. The story is partly told from Allen Pinkerton’s straightforward account, run-on sentences as impatient as his...

Nonfiction My heart is alive IT’S NOT YET DARK By Simon Fitzmaurice 165 pp. Hachette Ireland Reviewed by Sue Ellis If this were a memoir only about Lou Gehrig’s disease, you might wince at the thought of the predictable outcome. But it’s not that, which is to say, It’s Not Yet Dark puts succumbing to the disease where it belongs, at the bottom of Simon Fitzmaurice’s list of considerations. Before reading this book, you might have assumed that it is impossible to have any quality of life while hooked up to a ventilator, but Fitzmaurice eloquently dispenses with that line of thinking, explaining how he chooses to live fully despite his handicap and the attendant gadgetry that makes life possible. His story begins by describing a pre-Lou Gehrig’s moment of success in his chosen field. Fitmaurice is an award-winning writer and film director, holding degrees in both Anglo-Irish literature and drama, and in film theory and production. The moment of success was a call from the Sundance Film ...

Nonfiction Soaring notes and a miracle WAKING THE SPIRIT A Musician’s Journey Healing Body, Mind, and Soul By Andrew Schulman 312 pp. Picador Reviewed by Sue Ellis Waking the Spirit is professional musician Andrew Schulman’s touching account of expanding his repertoire into the theater of healing. He plays his guitar to stimulate the will to live in people who are gravely ill.  He begins with his own near-death experience, a devastating event brought on by complications of anaphylactic shock following surgery. After three days in ICU, his wife, Wendy, has a sudden inspiration – perhaps music can revive him. She chooses Bach’s St. Matthew Passion , a favorite of Schulman’s, and thanks to earbud cords and an iPod, the soaring notes work a miracle, a fact witnessed by a young doctor in the Surgical Intensive Care Unit. Here’s an excerpt: By early evening, Dr. Eiref told Wendy, with cautious optimism, that I was “out of the woods.” The medical charts, my SICU progress notes report woul...

Nonfiction Thinking like humans ALGORITHMS TO LIVE BY The Computer Science of Human Decisions By Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths 368 pp. Picador Reviewed by Sue Ellis An algorithm is a process, a series of logical steps taken to solve a problem, and is typically used to program computers to “think” like humans. In Brian Christian’s and Tom Griffiths’ new book, Algorithms to Live By , they explain eleven algorithms and the applications where they have been useful, and then suggest ways in which the same problem-solving process might help us in our daily lives. A few of the problems covered in the book are: prioritizing one’s way through a list of tasks, how to filter a list of job applicants and make the smartest pick, how to make better use of your memory and understand its limitations, and how to organize a closet. The suggestions are smart, thoroughly explained, and personable. Here’s a tongue-in-cheek excerpt about the roommate of Danny Hillis, inventor of the famous Connection Ma...

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...

Nonfiction Fusing of psyches THE FUTURE TENSE OF JOY By Jessica Teich 277 pp. Picador Reviewed by Sue Ellis The Future Tense of Joy is an engaging account of author Jessica Teich’s long journey to emotional well being. She begins by describing her over-reaction to her eldest daughter’s bid for more personal freedom, how it brought up memories of herself at the same age. To a past, she writes, that would not stay put. At sixteen, Teich had been drawn into a secret and abusive relationship with a man at the dance studio where she took lessons. She never told anyone, and had never come to terms with what happened to her or the fact that her parents failed to protect her. Early on, Teich introduces a woman she refers to as Lacey, a stranger she read about and whose life, according to the obituary, nearly paralleled her own. Both women were highly educated, both Rhodes scholars, and both appeared to have the world by the tail. The following excerpt sums up Teich’s feelings about the simila...

Fiction Beautiful woman, tempted man MANHATTAN NIGHT By Colin Harrison 358 pp. Picador Reviewed by Sue Ellis Colin Harrison’s Manhattan Night , a New York Times Notable Book of the Year originally named Manhattan Nocturne , is the gripping story of a smart guy who got reckless. His name is Porter Wren, a Manhattan tabloid writer trying to backpedal after a lapse in judgment. It’s an old premise: Beautiful woman, tempted man, and his frantic attempts to hide the indiscretion from his wife. When he’s blackmailed by the richest man in the city (who happens to be the owner of the newspaper he works for), his only option, if he wants to hold onto his family, is to out-think a couple of psychologically twisted people. He seems to be the perfect man for the job. Here’s an excerpt from the first page of the book, an effective hook that reveals the main character’s self image and sets the tone for what’s to come: I SELL MAYHEM, scandal, murder, and doom. Oh, Jesus I do, I sell tragedy, vengeanc...