Ethan Canin's new novel, "America America," is getting attention from newspaper book reviews across the country. Everyone says that it's grand in scope and ambition, which tempts comparison to other grand, ambitious novels.
Both the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Washington Post compare it to Robert Penn Warren's classic "All the King's Men." Like the earlier novel, "America America" follows a charming but flawed politician from the narrative perspective of a younger aide/journalist.
That young aide is brought into this circle of power and politics by a wealthy patriarch, a man with both riches and a sense of noblesse oblige. That character prompted the LA Times reviewer to make comparisons to "The Great Gatsby;" the Chicago Tribune went with another F. Scott Fitzgerald work, "The Last Tycoon."
The reviewers aren't entirely in accord with how successful the book is; some note that, despite its achievements, there are some structural problems (for the most extreme critique in this department, see the New York Times.)
The one things that everyone agreed upon is that there is a real-life corollary to the politician in "America America": a liberal senator with Presidential ambitions that are hampered by a tragic accident. If you can't guess who that might be, here's the answer.
In tomorrow's Book Review, Sarah Weinman reviews "Black and White," a new novel by Lewis Shiner. The book deals with some weighty issues, including a terminally ill parent, a murder and urban planning. In a post on John Scalzi's blog, Shiner focuses on the latter, writing about freeways:
When I started researching my new book, "Black & White,"
I hadn’t thought that much about freeways...."Black & White"is
about a North Carolina neighborhood called Hayti, once the most
prosperous black community in the South. During the 1960s, Hayti was
bulldozed to make room for the Durham Freeway, leading to a new
industrial development called Research Triangle Park. The money to do
it came in large part from the federal urban renewal program. All told,
urban renewal wiped out 150 neighborhoods like Hayti, and virtually all
of the displaced residents were African-American. Freeways were often
the excuse for the demolition....
The dream of the Interstate Highway System was to end traffic congestion forever. With the advantage of hindsight, [writer Tom] Lewis [in "Divided Highways"]makes it clear that the dream never had a chance. Once a highway is
built, new homes, stores, and workplaces will naturally spring up in
proximity. With more destinations now in reach of the freeway, traffic
grows to fill all available lanes. Expand the number of lanes and more
cars show up to choke them as well.
And the cycle grows more
vicious by the day. With more and more destinations accessible only by
freeway, cars become even more indispensable. Longer trips mean more
fuel consumption, more pollution. With highways getting all the money
and railroads proportionately starving, trucks take over all the
freight transportation. More pollution, more wear and tear on the
roads, more congestion.
And, eventually, the price of gas goes up to $4 a gallon (or here in LA, $4.73 per gallon). Which makes the real-world exploitation of the Interstate Highway System awfully pricey.
This makes me glad that a couple of years ago, a guy left Venice, CA in a convertible (I think a vintage Mustang) and drove to NYC with a time-lapse camera attached. Enjoy the result, a 4-minute cross-country drive, no gas required.
This weekend marks the first annual Sunset Strip Music Festival; many classic venues, including the Whiskey a Go Go, are hosting dozens of rock bands. But with sponsors that include Virgin America, Ticketmaster, Vitaminwater and this paper's own Metromix, it's clear this isn't the Doors' Sunset Strip anymore.
For five nights in November 1966, teenagers and police clashed on the Sunset Strip; the 2007 book "Riot on Sunset Strip: Rock 'n' Roll's Last Stand in Hollywood" tells the whole story. Only the last chapters focus on the riot itself -- most of the book provides a deep, detailed picture of the Southern California music scene in the mid-1960s, connecting the visual arts with TV and surf culture.
Author Dominic Priore's encyclopedic knowledge, it seems, encompasses everything from the origin of every garage rock band with a local hit to the industry's most powerful producers. He keeps it all tidy though, and the narrative that emerges is surprisingly detailed and informed for what appears, on the surface, to be a big pretty picture book.
It is also a big pretty picture book. More about that after the jump.
Arthur magazine, left; at right, Loren Coleman with one of the artifacts from the International Cryptozoology Museum.
Arthur magazine is in trouble. The not-quite-6-year-old free magazine has suffered a series of financial challenges, which culminated in editor Jay Babcock buying out his partner about a year ago. (Full disclosure: I've known Jay since we were both DJs at pirate radio station KBLT.)
Arthur is about music and politics, but that doesn't go far enough to describe its edginess. It is about independent music that gets little radio airplay, like alt-folk and contemporary psychedelia, and its politics are of the leftist, peacenik variety. Its columnists include media theorist Douglas Rushkoff and Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore; writers Trinie Dalton and Brian Evenson have contributed. With a penchant for challenging the (political or musical) status quo, it's quite a bit different from the glossy magazines found on newsstands.
This difference may be part of the problem. A magazine that's saying something no others are saying and covering music others don't cover might be hard for advertisers -- upon whom it relies -- to wrap their heads around. It's not unlike the problem faced by Loren Coleman of the International Cryptozoology Museum -- he's doing something that the big guys just don't get.
Unfortunately for Coleman, the "big guys" are at the Internal Revenue Service.
Naturalist John Muir is the focus of a feature in this month's Smithsonian magazine. The man who championed protecting natural spaces — especially in what is now Yosemite National Park — was born in Scotland, moved as a boy to Wisconsin and later hiked from Kentucky to south Florida; there, he got sick and headed to California to recuperate. Once he found the wilds of Northern California in 1868, he was smitten. He climbed rocks, cursed the sharp hooves of sheep that tore up wildflowers and even snuck President Teddy Roosevelt away from his handlers and into the backcountry for three nights of camping.
He also wrote like a fiend.
Most of Muir's writings — which appeared, predominantly, in magazines — are in the public domain. The Sierra Club has put many of them online, in HTML format, with the original illustrations (in other words, no PDF downloads). But if you prefer book form, there have been reprints, and in 1997 the Library of America published "John Muir: Nature Writings," a weighty 928 pages. Here's a taste from "The Yosemite," originally published in 1912:
But no temple made with hands can compare with Yosemite. Every rock in its walls seems to glow with life. Some lean back in majestic repose; others, absolutely sheer or nearly so for thousands of feet, advance beyond their companions in thoughtful attitudes, giving welcome to storms and calms alike, seemingly aware, yet heedless, of everything going on about them. Awful in stern, immovable majesty, how softly these rocks are adorned, and how fine and reassuring the company they keep: their feet among beautiful groves and meadows, their brows in the sky, a thousand flowers leaning confidently against their feet, bathed in floods of water, floods of light....
If that's not to your taste, a selection of books about Muir are after the jump.
It is not uncommon to hear an author talk about Amazon rankings. Amazon is one of the few places to get a sense of how a book is doing in real time — the elaborate, drawn-out process of getting sales numbers from bookstores and back to authors is (to say the least) Byzantine.
Despite its specialization — Amazon counts only its own sales, after all — the immediacy of these rankings can be addictive. I've heard authors talk about tracking their status against other books or trying to gauge exactly how many places a single sale might raise their rank. It can get a bit obsessive.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. In fact, it's such a common temptation that someone has built a Web application, Booklert, that obsessively checks Amazon rankings for you. The forward-thinking folks at if:book describe the tool this way:
I get a picture of Booklert as a time-saving tool for hypercompetitive and stat-obsessed writers, or possibly as a kind of masochistic entertainment for publishers morbidly addicted to seeing their industry flounder.
The truly obsessed author can even get Booklert updates via twitter. But sometimes, maybe, it's better to look away. if:book continues:
perhaps I'm being uncharitable... Booklert — or something similar — could be used to create personalized bestseller lists, adding a layer of market data to the work of trusted reviewers and curators.
I like the idea of personalized bestseller lists. But integrating them in a way that's useful would depend on who signs up for Booklert and how good the social networking tools are. Does someone who tracks books on personal finance, for example, really care about the interests of a cookbook lover?
Hmm... if they did, that could be interesting. The risks here are very low — Booklert is free.
The good thing about living in a big, wonderful city like Los Angeles is that you can be sure that big, wonderful writers like David Sedaris will come through town. The bad thing is that there's no guarantee you'll get to see them.
Sedaris is visiting Vroman's Bookstore this Sunday at 5 p.m. on his book tour to promote "When You Are Engulfed in Flames." I'd be tempted to whine about all the restrictions placed on attending — if I'd gotten one of the free tickets, that is. But what's the use? The Sedaris reading is "sold out."
How do bookstore appearances sell out? Do guys in yellow security jackets guard the door? (They just might.)
Vroman's, a big wonderful bookstore, has tried to make it up to the ticketless masses by allowing anybody who can't get into the reading to join the signing line (also ticketed) and by posting a podcast interview with the author. It's a bit salt-in-the-wound, but still, it's there and it's free.
There is another way to see David Sedaris ... after the jump.
Reviewing Patti Smith's new book of poetry "Auguries of Innocence" on Sunday, David L. Ulin called the author/singer the visionary poet-mother of rock-n-roll. Here she is, in 1976, beginning poetically with her song "Horses" and then rocking it, segueing into "Hey Joe."
The clip is from "Old Gray Whistle Test," a longtime BBC TV show.
... at least not to award-winning sci-fi writer and astrophysicist Gregory Benford ("Timescape," "If the Stars Are Gods," "The Sunborn").
When the UC Irvine professor and his (uncredited) coauthor, biologist Elisabeth Malartre, were researching their bestselling 1999 novel, "The Martian Race," they were "fairly certain" that ice eventually would be found on Mars, especially near the poles.
"Since 1999, NASA has found caves (large, identified from orbit) and plenty of signs of recent fluid flows down slopes, from momentary melting," Benford wrote in an e-mail after NASA announced that the substance uncovered by the Phoenix lander was most probably ice.
The before and after images -- of white stuff uncovered in a trench dug by Phoenix's robotic claw that disappears over a few days -- are spectacular in their simplicity. They underscore, for me at least, the Red Planet's grip on the human imagination. Why is that?
This is more than just a lovely piece of 19th century jewelry. It's a memorial to Jane Austen — look closely to see the faint outline of a grave with her name on it at the lower right. And it's (probably) crafted (probably) of Jane Austen's own hair.
At an auction last week, the locket was bought by an anonymous bidder for $9,478.
The buyer could have been almost anyone — 191 years after her death, Austen has plenty of enthusiastic fans. The Jane Austen Society of North America counts 4,000 members; maybe it was one of them. Or perhaps it was someone with a high profile. An Austen blogger posits it might have been J.K. Rowling, who once said that Austen was her favorite writer. The author of the "Harry Potter" series certainly could drop 4,800 pounds on a trinket without denting her budget.
According to most accounts, hair jewelry was popularized during Queen Victoria's extended period of mourning. But the practice of weaving or twisting the hair of a loved one into complex designs, like the one above, goes back several hundred years (the 2004 book "Mourning and Art Jewelry" has all the details). It was not considered creepy to trim the hair from a corpse — as was done in Austen's case — in order to wear it close to one's heart.
At the same auction, a first edition of Austen's "Sense and Sensibility" sold for 30,000 pounds (almost $60,000). Six years ago, a "Pride and Prejudice" first edition sold for $62,000. The hair jewelry might have been a bargain after all.
Subscribe to this Blog What is RSS?
Book Editor, Los Angeles Times
Deputy Book Editor, Los Angeles Times
Lead blogger, Jacket Copy
email: jacketcopyla [at] gmail.com
Assistant Book Editor
Staff Writer, Los Angeles Times