Books Editor Jon Thurber announces retirement from Los Angeles Times

After more than four decades at the Los Angeles Times, Jon Thurber has announced he will be leaving the newspaper. Thurber joined The Times in 1971, starting out as a clerk on the foreign desk; since 2010, he has been books editor.

In an email to staff, Times Editor Davan Maharaj and Assistant Managing Editor for Features Alice Short noted Thurber’s guidance in developing special holiday book sections and shaping Sunday books coverage. He is expected to continue in his position until early summer.

Prior to becoming books editor, Thurber was managing editor, print; he worked closely with then-Editor Russ Stanton on a number of newsroom initiatives. He had previously been obituary editor for 11 years.

The official notice to staff is after the jump.

Photo: Jon Thurber. Credit: Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times

On Sunday: Lyndon Johnson, Toni Morrison and the history of cookbooks

A recent piece on Robert Caro in the New York Times Magazine carried the cover lines “ Roert Caro Is a Dinosaur and Thank God for That.” Caro is indeed a product of bygone days. He eschews a computer and continues to write on an electric typewriter. And he still composes long, thoughtful prose on the subject that has captivated him now for decades: Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Now  the fourth volume in Caro’s epic study of the 36th president, “The Passage of Power,” is out, and it is the focus of the books coverage in Sunday’s Arts & Books section. Our reviewer, Wendy Smith, notes that this volume covers Johnson’s years of deepest humiliation as he gave up his powerful role as majority leader of the Senate to become a vice-presidential candidate on the Democratic Party ticket headed by John F. Kennedy. This was the pre-Dick Cheney vice presidency, when it wasn't much of a job — and Johnson was indeed the subject of ridicule from the New Frontiersmen who populated much of JFK’s administration.

Fate intervened, however, and Johnson was there in Dallas with Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963, when the president was shot to death. He took the oath of office and, over the next few months, took over JFK’s domestic program and made it his own. Johnson “bent Congress to his will as Kennedy had never been able to do,”  Caro writes. Those who have read the three previous volumes of Caro’s work, which carry the overall title “The Years of Lyndon Johnson,” will find that “The Passage of Power” has a “different tone from its predecessors,” Smith writes. It’s a tone of sympathy and admiration "for a man who ‘not only had held the country steady during a difficult time but had set it on a new course, a course toward social justice.”

Also Sunday, book critic David L. Ulin looks at Toni Morrison's new novel, “Home.” In Ulin’s reading, Morrison’s work can be astonishingly uneven. Three of her novels, Ulin says, are masterpieces — “Song of Solomon,” “Beloved” and “ A Mercy” -- but others are less so, and “Home” (at about 148 pages) falls into that category, Ulin writes. His explanation makes for a fascinating read on the construction of novels.

More after the jump.

Coming Sunday: To Live and Write in L.A.

This is the weekend of the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, when tens of thousands of book lovers converge on the USC campus for two days of panels, events, readings and just plain fun.

In the spirit of ideas, which the festival clearly brings to Southern California, we reached out to four people participating in the festival to get their views on the joys and challenges of being L.A. writers. Under the banner "To Live and Write in L.A." Tod Goldberg, Janet Fitch, Robert Crais and Leo Braudy didn't let us down.

Goldberg's piece opens our coverage in Sunday Arts & Books with his perspective of first seeing the city as a 9-year-old coming over the Grapevine with his older brother.

Fitch observes that the very act of writing about the city is, in fact, an act of creating the city and offering a chance to open people's eyes to a world they may not normally see.

Suspense writer Crais sees the city and its more than 114 separate neighborhoods as a veritable gold mine of story telling opportunities.

Braudy relates his personal history of growing up in Philadelphia and coming to the Southland under the misconception that the area has no real history to speak of and learning that L.A.'s fictional image often overshadows its real story. All excellent, glorious works on a weekend when we celebrate ideas and the written word.

David Ulin's contribution to the conversation is a finely observed critic's notebook on the literary legacy of the riots after the verdict in the Rodney King beating case 20 years ago. Ulin summons up a very short list of excellent works on the riots (including Lynell George's extraordinary essay "Waiting for the Rainbow Sign," which we print online with Ulin's piece) but observes that "the shelf of books addressing the disaster is threadbare, conditional even, as if we've never figured out how to write about these events." The why of that makes for a profound read.

Jesmyn Ward is no stranger to civic disaster. She was coming out of a subway in New York as the World Trade Center was crumbling on Sept. 11, 2001. DeLisle, her hometown on the Mississippi coast, was battered by Hurricane Katrina. And she struggled to keep herself together so she could write. And write she can, as the National Book Award jury noted last year when it gave Ward its fiction prize for "Salvage the Bones," a novel about a poor African American family in Mississippi who are right in the path of Katrina. Carolyn Kellogg talked to Ward, who is participating in the festival, and got the full story of what draws her back to DeLisle time and again.

This Sunday: Figment, Charles Dickens, Etgar Keret and more

It’s been a busy week around The Times' book department as we get ready for the Festival of Books in just two weeks (April 21 and 22) at USC. We’ve been planning coverage leading up to the festival and thinking about the great writers, editors and publishing figures coming to town to talk about our favorite subject: books. If you haven’t had time to check the lineup of outstanding panels, conversations and other presentations, please check it here.

   Meanwhile, a relatively new communication platform and a decidedly old one highlight our book coverage on Sunday. The new one is Figment, the social networking site primarily for teens, where budding writers can critique their work and the work of others. The site’s slogan is “Write Yourself In,” and in just 15 months, more than 200,000 young people have done so and more than 350,000 individual pieces have been posted. According to Jacob Lewis, a former managing editor at the New Yorker and Portfolio who is in charge of the site’s day-to-day operation, they add 1,000 new pieces a day.

"It’s essential that our users feel a sense of ownership," Lewis told Times book critic David Ulin, who writes about Figment’s rapid rise for this Sunday's Arts & Book section. Currently on Figment, according to Ulin, is a mix that includes the first chapter of Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” as well as Rachel Hawkins’ third “Hex Hall” novel, “Spell Bound.”  “You’re as likely to find a reference to Tom Waits or William S. Burroughs as to ‘Harry Potter’ or ‘The Hunger Games,' ” Ulin writes.  “Its success, then, simply reaffirms what readers everywhere have always known: that literature and reading aren’t going anywhere.” The site’s founders, Lewis and New Yorker writer Dana Goodyear, will be honored on April 20 at the L.A. Times Book Prizes with the Innovator’s Award. 

The decidedly old platform is letter-writing, and this Sunday we look at 450 examples of Charles Dickens' masterful epistolary prose that have been gathered for “The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens,” edited by Jenny Hartley. Our reviewer novelist Nicholas Delbanco notes that “By the time he died, at 58, he was world-famous and besieged with mail; he answered correspondence promptly and received by his own attestation 'three or four score letters every day.' ”  That’s a lot of mail to keep up with. No wonder he died at 58. Think not? Try sitting down and writing a letter — snail mail, that is — to your Aunt Bruce in Cincinnati.  One of our favorite examples from Dickens, which Delbanco notes with pleasure, is this snippet he wrote, when 21, to Maria Beadnell, who had rejected his advances: “I have often said before and I say again I have borne more from you than I do believe any creature breathing ever bore from a woman before.”

More after the jump

Sunday: Building alternative worlds, William Gibson and 'The Lady in Gold'

Call them Philip K. Dick’s “Lessons on Building a Believable Universe.” That’s what Times Book Critic David Ulin uses as a reference in creating the framework for his review of Matt Ruff’s “The Mirage,” a novel that turns the tables on 9/11. In Ruff’s alternative universe, 9/11 is actually 11/9 and the war on terror takes place in a fundamentalist America. Planes are still going into buildings, but they are piloted by Christian terrorists and the structures they are headed for are in downtown Baghdad and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.  And, of course, there is a fourth plane that crashes after its passengers attempt to retake it from the hijackers. Sound familiar? Ulin writes that this is a “terrific setup, using fiction to take events and tweak them, albeit recognizably.” Read Ulin’s review to see if this works with Dick’s thoughts on building a believable universe. The review of “The Mirage” leads our Sunday Arts & Books coverage.

Margaret Wappler reviews Canadian cyberpunk soothsayer William Gibson’s “Distrust That Particular Flavor,” which brings together some of his writings from Wired, Rolling Stone and Time Asia. Wappler writes that Gibson’s prose “crackles to life when he writes about Singapore and Japan in the '90s and early '00s.” Wappler notes how Gibson, better known for his futuristic novels, explains in his introduction that “nonfiction feels like trying to play the African thumb piano, an instrument he scarcely knows.” But the collection, nonetheless, is engaging and revelatory.

Revelatory, as well, is Claremont-McKenna professor Frederick Lynch’s review of Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart: The State of White America: 1960-2010,” in which Murray, whom Lynch says “made the Politically Incorrect Ten Most Wanted List 18 years ago when he co-wrote 'The Bell Curve,' provides a data-driven argument for inequality’s cultural and sociological roots [and] arrives just in time for the central political and policy debate of the 2012 elections.”

That debate, of course, concerns the widening income gap in America.

More of Sunday's pages after the jump.

This Sunday: Pico Iyer's Greene agenda and more

Pico Iyer and I share something in common and it isn’t writing chops. We share a fascination with Graham Greene.

Years ago, I collected as many of the nice Penguin paperback editions of Greene’s work that I could find.  I loved “The Quiet American,” "The End of the Affair" and “The Third Man” and many others. When I first traveled in Europe, I would stumble into English-language bookstores and my barometer on the quality of their selection was always based on their section of Greene's work. But I’m no expert on Greene and Iyer is -- as witnessed by his latest book “The Man Within My Head.” Our reviewer, Richard Rayner, is fascinated by both Greene and Iyer. In his lively review he notes that “The Man Within My Head” is “literary criticism disguised as autobiography, a book filled with insights, sadness, rumination and splashes of the dazzling travelogue that Iyer’s readers have come to expect.” Rayner’s piece is as much a meditation on Greene as it is on Iyer’s book and it leads our coverage this Sunday.

Book critic David Ulin found a gem in “The Fat Years,’ the first novel by Chinese writer Chan Koonchung to be translated into English. (Michael S. Duke does the honors.) The novel takes place in 2013 after the next great global economic meltdown and China is left standing as the pillar of economic and social stability. The catch here, however, is that between the economic meltdown and China’s emergence as the bastion of prosperity, it has lost a month. Ulin writes that the book “is a cunning caricature of modern China with its friction between communism and consumerism.”

Scott Martelle reviews “Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State and the Birth of Liberty” by John M. Barry. Martelle writes that Williams “for those who don’t remember their colonial history, founded the European settlement that gave rise to Providence, R.I., in pursuit of the still-gestating idea that people should be able to worship God in individual freedom not as a dictum of government." It was, author Barry writes, “the first government in the world which broke church and state apart.” But Williams faced some long odds in selling his message of liberty and paid dearly for his concept. 

Long odds are also in evidence in Stewart O’Nan’s latest novel “The Odds,” which Carolyn Kellogg reviews. A marriage has hit the rocks, so the happy (not) couple head to Niagara Falls, where they spent their honeymoon, carrying with them a history of “insolvency, indecision and stupidity,” as well as a “desperate gambling plan” that, if successful, “will make everything right.”  Kellogg notes that “all of this could make for rather grim melodrama, but not in O’Nan’s hands.”

More after the jump ...

Books this week: On Dear Leader and a capricious God

 

Adam Johnson teaches creative writing at Stanford University and he describes himself as “probably the most un-Korean person in the world.” But that wasn’t the largest obstacle to Johnson in writing “The Orphan Master’s Son,” his new novel on that most closed of societies, North Korea, and the cult of personality around its now late -- but fully-alive in the book -- leader Kim Jong Il. Times staff writer Reed Johnson, no relation to the author, profiles Adam Johnson and his book, which is getting  lot  of attention, in a piece that starts on Sunday’s Arts & Books cover. He writes: “Possibly Johnson’s greatest challenge was trying to infiltrate the inner lives of characters in a country where self-censorship and blending in with the anonymous throng are essential for survival.” Adam Johnson, who will be at Vroman’s in Pasadena on Tuesday night, visited North Korea in 2007 to gain insight after spending years researching his novel, working from a handful of books by escaped dissidents. He also cited Times staff writer Barbara Demick’s book “Nothing to Envy:   Ordinary Lives in North Korea" as being particularly helpful “because she was always focused on the human dimension.”

Shalom Auslander also writes about the human dimension, but as David L. Ulin, our book critic, notes in a review of  his new novel “Hope: A Tragedy,” Auslander’s  great subject is “God’s capriciousness,” which can be challenging to frame.  Ulin notes that what Auslander brings to the task is "willfully outrageous, [he’s] a black humorist with an Old Testament moralist’s heart." This is Auslander’s first novel after the 2005 short story collection “Beware of God,” and his 2007 memoir “Foreskin’s Lament.”

As I was reading Scott Martelle’s review of “The Partnership:  Five Cold Warriors and Their Quest to Ban the Bomb," I was lamenting the lost value of bipartisanship in dealing with some of the nation’s difficult issues. The book, by former New York Times staffer Philip Taubman, records the efforts of four officials — Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Sam Nunn and William Perry — and Sidney Drell, a Stanford physicist and nuclear expert, to curb nuclear weapons around the world. Martelle calls it a “complex book about complex subjects” but note that “Taubman does a clean job of reducing the elements to layman’s terms.”  

In her review of “The Odditorium,” a collection of stories by Melissa Pritchard,  Carolyn Kellogg notes that the “literary landscape is jammed with short stories.” They are a “glut” on the market, Kellogg writes, but she also notes that few of the authors working that parcel of the literary landscape “rise above to be seen as truly excellent.” She notes that “at her best,  Melissa Pritchard belongs in that number.”

Kenneth Turan takes a little break from the film critic’s beat to reflect on P.D. James' latest, “Death Comes to Pemberley,” which couples the formidable talents of the 91-year-old James with the Jane Austen set for murder and mayhem at the ancestral estate of Mr. Darcy of “Pride and Prejudice” fame. Fans of James and Austen seem happy with the marriage: The book is  No. 3 on this week's L.A. Times best-seller list for fiction.

The subject of suicide is not easy in the young adult market, and surviving suicide perhaps even less so. But Susan Carpenter writes that Jennifer R. Hubbard’s new book for ages 14 and up,  “Try Not to Breathe,” is a compelling and compassionate look into the motivations and rationales of teen suicide and the aftermath when it fails.”

Busy week? If so, you may have missed Patt Morrison's fine review of Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch;" Bob Drogin's take on Michael Hasting's provocative "The Operators:  The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America's War in Afghanistan" and Kerry Luft's review of  "The Obamas."  And mark your calendar for Feb. 7 to see which critic will receive the Hatchet Job of the Year Award." Carolyn Kellogg  fills us in on the contestants. For you Stephen King fans, think for a moment about King Lear and then take a look at David Ulin's Reading Life  piece on King.

As always, thanks for reading.

-- Jon Thurber, book editor

Photo: Adam Johnson in North Korea near the Pohyon Temple. Credit: Adam Johnson

 

 

This weekend: Ry Cooder, holiday book guide

OK, OK. Maybe they're not together in the same issue -- more on that later -- but this weekend's book coverage includes Times’ book critic David L. Ulin’s fascinating conversation with musician Ry Cooder about his newfound career as a short-story writer. Cooder's book "Los Angeles Stories" (published by City Lights) brings to the printed page the same storytelling process that inspired his so-called California Trilogy of albums “Chavez Ravine,” “My Name Is Buddy” and “I, Flathead.” Ulin calls the stories "deftly rendered” as they offer a panorama of the city between 1940 and 1958, the year the Dodgers came to town. We've got an excerpt of Cooder's story "All in a Day's Work" here.

Other reviews in Sunday Arts & Books offer a virtual travelogue of interesting  places and people. Times Theater critic Charles McNulty looks at James Wolcott, Vanity Fair’s “takedown artist extraordinaire,” as he recounts growing up in '70s New York and his friendship with critic Paulene Kael in "Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York." Carolyn Kellogg reviews “Salvage the Bones,” the pre-Hurricane Katrina, Mississippi-based novel that just won the National Book Award for fiction. The author, Jesmyn Ward, Kellogg notes, “wanted to write about poor, black rural Southerners in such a way that the greater culture would see their stories....”

Out of Africa, this week, is our review of L.A. Times reporter Christopher Goffard’s “You Will See Fire: A Search for Justice in Kenya,” the true-life tale of American Catholic priest John Kaiser and his quest for social change in one of the most corrupt countries in Africa. Kaiser dies for his trouble, and that fact fuels Goffard's narrative, which our reviewer, Richard Rayner, calls “a moving and powerful” story.  The reporting for the book came from a three-part series of articles that Goffard wrote for The Times in 2009.  

And, lest we forget, next Wednesday marks the 70^th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor: We include an excerpt from “Pacific Crucible," Ian W. Toll’s history of the war in the Pacific during 1941-42. In her Not Just for Kids column on YA books, Susan Carpenter looks at Cassandra Clare’s “The Clockwork Prince: The Infernal Devices, Book Two,” in which the author blends "societal restraint and an otherworldly battle into a steamy steampunk drama."

Ok, so back to holiday books. This week we present our annual 28-page holiday guide of book choices and gift ideas (Section U in the print newspaper) along with reviewer lists, including thoughts from book critic Ulin on what titles to load onto that electronic device you may be giving someone, Carolyn Kellogg on what tablet devices are selling this season, Susan Carpenter on what’s hot for kids of all ages and Nick Owchar on compelling reads about history’s turning points.

Thanks for reading.

-- Jon Thurber, Book editor  

Image: Cover of the L.A. Times holiday books & gift ideas guide. Credit: Elvis Swift / For The Times

Sunday books: Joseph Heller, Freud's cocaine and more

It's been 50 years since the publication of Joseph Heller's "Catch-22," an occasion marked by two new books: the first biography of the author, who died in 1999, and a memoir from his wryly funny daughter. Carolyn Kellogg reviews "Just One Catch: A Biography of Joseph Heller" by Tracy Daugherty and Erica Heller's "Yossarian Slept Here: When Joseph Heller was Dad, the Apthorp was Home and Life was a 'Catch-22.' "

Meanwhile, Richard Rayner explores "An Anatomy of Addiction: Sigmund Freud, William Halsted, and the Miracle Drug Cocaine" by Howard Markel. "In my last severe depression, I took coca again, and a small dose lifted me to the heights in a wonderful fashion. I am just now busy collecting the literature for a song of praise to this magic substance," Freud wrote to his fiancee, Martha, on June 2, 1884. Indeed. The book follows the lives of two men of science (the mind and medicine, respectively) and their intersections with cocaine; Rayner finds it "rich, engrossing."

David L. Ulin reviews the latest by Laura Lippman, one of Baltimore's finest mystery novelists. "Beware the wild child. That's the message of Laura Lippman's 'The Most Dangerous Thing,' a novel that occupies the unlikely middle ground between thriller and coming-of-age saga, shifting from present to past as it tells the story of five childhood friends and the fateful night in 1979 that changed their lives."

In our column Not Just for Kids, Susan Carpenter looks at National Book Award finalist Cristina García's first young-adult novel. "Friendships are often forged in uncomfortable environs, when individuals who wouldn't ordinarily meet are forced to interact. Such is the case in 'Dreams of Significant Girls,' a young-adult novel that unfolds in a Swiss boarding school and makes roommates of three girls from radically different backgrounds."

Fashion writer Adam Tschorn looks back at a 1953 book about certain military men and their obsession with uniforms. "'The Reason Why: The Story of the Fatal Charge of the Light Brigade' by Cecil Woodham-Smith ... focuses on the contentious relationship between the seventh Earl of Cardigan and the third Earl of Lucan, their obsession with the details of their station and the trappings of military regalia rather than with any actual fighting." When the enemy has cherry-colored pants and fur hats adorned with brilliant plumes, must one retaliate with braids and epaulets? En garde!

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Joseph Heller in 1979. Credit: Iris Schneider / Los Angeles Times

In our pages: E.L. Doctorow, Colm Toibin, boxing, Lee Krasner

In our pages Sunday, we review books on boxing and artist Lee Krasner, two young adult novels, the latest novel from Alice Hoffman, short story collections from Colm Tóibín and E.L. Doctorow and more. The reviews are online now.

David L. Ulin reviews "All the Time in the World: New and Selected Stories" by E.L. Doctorow, an unexpected collection from a National Book Award-winning and National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author best known for big novels such as "Ragtime." Many of the characters, Ulin writes, suffer from "emotional exhaustion, the sense of having been caught unexpectedly in the middle of their lives with no clear through-line between the present and the past. As for the future, it is something of a glaring blankness, less a promise than a burden to be endured."

A "slow deletion of personal relationships" is at the center of the nine stories in Colm Tóibín's "The Empty Family," George Ducker writes. "Tóibín projects a slideshow of reclusive figures, many of whom have found that a life well-hid is a life sufficient. With a spare, eloquent style, he guides us through hotel lobbies and pensiónes from Dublin to Barcelona. He directs our attention to estranged family members, divorcées and Muslim immigrants, catching each of them at the moment in which they are forced to reckon with their pasts."

In 1973, Lee Krasner told a reporter, "I happen to be Mrs. Jackson Pollock, and that's a mouthful. The only thing I haven't had against me was being black. I was a woman, Jewish, a widow, a damn good painter, thank you, and a little too independent." Suzanne Muchnic writes in her review of the new biography "Lee Krasner," "Art historian Gail Levin, also an expert on artist Edward Hopper, has drawn on her close association with Krasner and extensive research to produce a biography that rings fair and true."