The best of the real
What I didn't get to this year and wanted to: Andrew Polizzotti's biography of
André Breton; John Richardson's second volume on Picasso; Legs McNeil
and Gillian McCain's Please Kill Me; Richard Kluger's history of the
tobacco industry, Ashes to Ashes. What I got to and happily put down:
Paul Hendrickson's smug The Quick and the Dead. What I got to and
unhappily put down: Simon Frith's Performance Rites, with its brilliance
drowning in jargon. What I wish I hadn't gotten to: James Ellroy's odious,
racist, reactionary, sleazy (stop me anytime) My Dark Places. What I had
no desire to get to: Hitler's Willing Executioners. I'm shocked,
shocked, to discover there was a virulent strain of anti-Semitism in Nazi
Germany.
What I got to and liked, alphabetically by author:
A Tale of Two Utopias, by Paul Berman (Norton)
Subtitled The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968, Berman's
shrewd and reasoned critique, both clear-eyed and admiring, paid the spirit of
that amazing year the honor it deserves without ignoring the excesses. Writing
about the way that spirit resurfaced in Eastern Europe in 1989, Berman says,
"Suddenly it was obvious that those long ago utopian efforts to change the
shape of the world were a young people's rehearsal, preparatory to adult events
that only came later."
Words for the Taking, by Neal Bowers (Norton)The poet
Neal Bowers's detective story of his search for the plagiarist who was
submitting Bowers's poems to poetry journals under his own name. The
plagiarist's brazenness and wiliness are only slightly more amazing than the
indifference and charges of authorial arrogance directed at Bowers by his
academic colleagues, the lawyer he consults, and the journal editors he
contacts. Eloquently and without stridency, Bowers gives an accounting of just
what, to their author, words are worth.
Lush Life, A Biography of Billy Strayhorn, by David Hadju
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)The Billy Strayhorn standard that David Hadju's
bio is named for is the epitome of sophisticated, world-weary romantic
disappointment. This loving and lovely book about the man who was Duke
Ellington's oft-overlooked collaborator locates that same gorgeous melancholy
in Strayhorn's life, with a class and style he'd tip his hat to.
The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice,
by Christopher Hitchens (Verso)Who says there are no sacred cows left?
Except for Murray Kempton's perceptive review in the New York Review of
Books, Christopher Hitchens's passionately reasoned jeremiad against Mother
Teresa has been ignored since it appeared, late in '95. What is there to lodge
against this saint on Earth, you ask? Plenty. You didn't know about the quality
of "care" in her missionaries (unsterilized needles used again and again)?
About her insistence on foisting her asceticism on her charges (AIDS patients
prevented from watching the Winter Olympics as their Lenten sacrifice)? About
her bare-bones care of the sick and dying despite having an enormous global
income, including stolen millions accepted from embezzler Charles Keating? Read
Hitchens and let the scales fall. Orwell said all saints should be judged
guilty until proven innocent. Hitchens rings down a guilty verdict on the woman
he aptly calls "the ghoul of Calcutta."
The Dustbin of History, by Greil Marcus (Harvard)
Another late-'95 release. Not just our best rock critic but one of our best
cultural critics, period, Marcus understands in his bones that good work can be
around any corner. These essays about the struggles of people -- in literature,
politics, pop music -- to be subjects, rather than objects, of history extends
to readers a chance to enter into a conversation and discover for themselves
the freedoms Marcus's artists have created.
Graceland: Going Home with Elvis, by Karal Ann
Marling (Harvard)A near-masterpiece. Imaginatively thought and generously
felt, Graceland isn't just an essential addition to Elvis literature but
a shrewd, empathetic meditation on the unexpected dignity that lurks beneath
the kitsch surface of middle-class taste. Marling, a professor of art history
and American studies at the University of Minnesota, makes Graceland's
smallness and tackiness, and Elvis's unquenchable thirst for newness, almost
inexpressively, and never condescendingly, moving. "Ghosts walk through
Graceland," she writes, "alongside every tourist, whispering softly about the
places we call home."
Angela's Ashes, by Frank McCourt (Scribners)A
jewel amid a glut of memoirs, and an unexpected (and thoroughly deserving)
bestseller. Like all great memoirs, Frank McCourt's tale of growing up
desperately poor and hungry in 1930s Limerick is utterly bereft of self-pity.
The amazing thing is how funny, how alive it is. In his first book, McCourt,
for years a writing teacher in Bedford-Stuyvesant, pens prose that rolls off
the page like a song. You read it and think it must have been language itself
that filled his young belly for all those years.
The Missing, by Andrew O'Hagan (New Press)This
extraordinary book by the young (28) Scottish writer is an exploration not just
of what it means to go missing but of what can go missing -- places as well as
people, victims and victimizers, the "documentary lives" of those who join the
ranks of the homeless. This book of social criticism makes almost poetic
connections. It's profoundly unnerving because of O'Hagan's measured,
unflinching voice, but with a deep empathy that keeps him connected to the
world as he explores its potential for violence. The nonfiction book of the
year.
Duchamp, by Calvin Tomkins (Henry Holt) Tomkins sees the
spirit that informs Duchamp's masterpiece The Large Glass as "epic joy,"
and the spirit that informed the artist's life as much the same. Stubbornly
refusing to interpret, Tomkins sticks to just the facts. But he brings out the
deep amusement that characterized the most playful of this century's
influential artists.
Ghosts of Mississippi, by Maryanne Vollers (Little,
Brown)Don't confuse this with the atrocious upcoming movie of the same name
(the makers optioned only the title of Vollers's book, not the content). This
account of the 1963 murder of NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers and how his
killer was finally convicted 30 years and three trials later works as detective
story and courtroom drama, and as an accounting of the cost of change. If the
third trial of Byron de la Beckwith is a tale of how justice delayed was
finally served, it's also about how a past that seems eons ago can feel as
fresh as a new wound.
-- Charles Taylor
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