Need For reads

Nonfiction Conscience defined by combat THE RISE OF A PRAIRIE STATESMAN:  The Life and Times of George McGovern By Thomas J. Knock 434 pp. Princeton University Press Reviewed by Diane Diekman The Rise Of A Prairie Statesman: The Life And Times Of George McGovern is the first volume of a major two-part biography on the most eloquent critic of the Vietnam War. Thomas J. Knock, a distinguished historian and teaching professor at Southern Methodist University, has written an aptly titled account of the life and times, through the 1968 elections, of this U.S. Senator from South Dakota. George McGovern was elected to a second term in the U.S. Senate in 1968, after losing to Hubert Humphrey for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States. The two had been close friends until divided by the war in Vietnam. Early in the Presidential campaign, Humphrey picked up the torch for President Lyndon Johnson’s bombing approach, while McGovern supported Robert Kennedy’s de-escalatio...

Lines in the Ice: Exploring the Roof of the World by Philip Hatfield Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2016 Reviewed by Russell A. Potter Over the years, the staff here at the Arctic Book Review have seen more than our share of large-format pictorial books about the Arctic, its explorers, and inhabitants. Yet until now, no single book has so richly brought together all the historical, cultural, and geographical aspects of the frozen zone in quite the way that Philip Hatfield's Lines in the Ice manages. From Hakluyt's charts in the sixteenth century to the very latest in digital maps, we see here, in  panoramic procession, the full panoply of our predilection with the Earth's vast, yet far from trackless northern regions. Part of this is by design; the book is, in essence, an extended, expanded catalogue of an exhibition of the same name at the British Library, whose resources in this, as in other areas of visual culture, are enormous. The differe...

Fiction Double trouble PARADIME – A NOVEL By Alan Glynn 255 pp. Picador Reviewed by Dennis C. Rizzo What would you do if you discovered someone was your double? Not just “kind-a looks like you”, but a real double. The laws of probability say it’s fairly possible. Some of us have had the experience, or know those who have. In  Paradime , Alan Glynn explores what might be, and what might result. Danny Lynch, a two-tour veteran of Iraq and sometime sous chef, now slipping in and out of work in Manhattan, stumbles onto what he thinks is an opportunity to make some cash. I then stand there, staring through the window, and it takes me a while to see it, for it to click – my own reflection in the glass is superimposed on Trager. He’s facing in my direction but is busy with his phone and doesn’t appear to see me. For my part, I switch focus from one image to the other, from mine to his, and back again, until I get confused...Trager scruffy and unshaven one second, me groomed and in a ...

Fiction Wild child, gentle wisent Codex Orféo: A Novel By Michael Charles Tobias 242 pp. Springer Reviewed by David E. Hoekenga, M.D. This is a thriller about geo-terrorism, anti-Semitism, the Holocaust as it reverberates decades later, and grasping global pharmaceutical syndicates. The more interesting subplot involves the intriguing biology of Belarus, including a hundred species of bees, bracket fungi (a new darling in the fight against cancer), six-hundred-year-old oak trees, red squirrels and the beloved, ancient wisent, or European wood bison.   However, there were also ticks that could crawl undetected up one’s anus and deliver the universally fatal encephalitis that had in recent years increased four-fold in prevalence. The form of the novel is most unusual. It consists of ninety short chapters, one only three sentences long. The author uses this technique to “propel the reader into a continuous zone of the unexpected.”   It also includes thirteen high-quality photos b...

NONFICTION Slighted heroes Honor before Glory By Scott McGaugh 304 pp. Da Capo Reviewed by William C. Crawford American exceptionalism often plays out through our sordid treatment of our most loyal but vulnerable citizens. The US under attack often creates opportunity for our wrongly maligned patriots to erase, without doubt, any question as to their commitment to America. The imprisonment of solid Japanese-American citizens during World War II is now a well-known if seamy chapter in our history. I recently visited the museum at the windswept former internment camp in California known as Manzanar. One of the most telling if ironic features on exhibit there were the faded photos of young Japanese-American GIs in uniform returning to Manzanar to visit their captive parents. The heroic stories of Nisei soldiers in the European theater and Burma are only recently an emerging theme in the annals of World War II history. Honor before Glory brings long overdue light to the little known heroi...

Nonfiction The footballingest football book ever THE PERFECT PASS: American Genius and the Reinvention of Football By S. C. Gwynne 271 pp. Scribner Reviewed by Jack Shakely I was born and raised in Oklahoma, the state that legendary coach Bennie Owens said had two favorite sports, football and spring football. I am nuts about football. I bleed crimson and cream every autumn Saturday for my beloved Oklahoma Sooners. I thought I could never get enough football. Until I read The Perfect Pass. This is the footballingest football book you will ever read outside of the Dallas Cowboys playbook. Even Vince Lombardi’s autobiography has fewer diagrams. It has more x’s and o’s than a game of tic-tac-toe. Which is surprising, given the book’s author. S. C. Gwynne is the Pulitzer-prize finalist author of the brilliant Empire of the Summer Moon, one of the best nonfiction books ever written about the Plains Indians. He has the writing chops, and he often shows them here. But not often enough. I thou...

Fiction BENEATH THE COYOTE HILLS By William Luvaas 238 pp. Spuyten Duyvil  Reviewed by David E. Hoekenga, M.D. Our hero is a writer named Thomas Aristophanus, and he has “spells.” Tommy lives in an olive grove outside the town of Hamlet, a scrappy burg in the high desert of Southern California. It is a down-at-the heels community peopled by social security retirees living in run-down trailers inherited from former retirees who died in them, ex-cons and sexual predators, evangelical shouters (a church on every corner) , recyclable collectors, and nutcase old farts tooting around in golf carts decked out with American flags. Diabetic tubbies trip out of Walmart pushing shopping carts full of cheap carbs and gizmos from China. How can they afford all that shit? Gun nuts blast holes in the mudstone cliffs in the wash below my place or take aim at the cross atop the ‘The First Church of the One True Christ,’ modeled on the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove. They dodged through the sageb...