Books for Dudes: My BEA Basket of Awesome

I am known as a friend to the backlist, keeping titles in print by merely mentioning them. With such power I have restored to livelihood such fine publications as Larry King's Personal Grooming Tips, Vlad Putin's How To Win Friends and Influence People*, The Gulf Coast Shrimp Boat Captain's Manual, and Al and Tipper Gore's Guide to Staying Together Forever, with an introduction by Sandra Bullock and Jesse James.

But as a result of appearing on the Librarian Shout 'n' Share panel at BookExpo America 2010, I received a buttload of new and forthcoming titles. Deselecting the undudeworthy (e.g., anything with the word Contessa in the title), I was left with this basket of awesome that I really enjoyed and think you will, too.

Bailey, Elisabeth Tova. The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating: A True Story. Algonquin. Aug. 2010. 183p. ISBN 978-1-56512-606-0. $18.95. MEMOIR
Wait, did you say a wild snail? As opposed to domestic? Well, I'm intrigued. In this memoir, the author is struck down by a mysterious illness that leaves her bedridden. She comes to describe her own body as "a bizarre and bewildering place," a phrase that describes my morning routine. When a visiting pal brings her a snail-actually hands it to her-she's baffled. A snail? WTF? She puts it in a nearby violet and scarcely notices it for the next few days until she finds "a mysterious square hole just below the return address" in an envelope propped against the plant. Poet Bailey chooses her words with care and writes "quietly," noticing for example "[t]he tiny, intimate sound of the snail's eating," the "distinct feeling of companionship and shared space" or "the comforting sound of the snail's miniscule munching." What did humble little Mr. Snail do? Not much (he's a snail), but he became the perfect pet, perfectly fitting into a world reduced to a bed and a room. Described as graceful, ponderous, adventurous, fearless, tireless (but not named, oddly), he "reminded [her] that [she] wasn't alone."

Berrier, Jr., Ralph. If Trouble Don't Kill Me: A Family's Story of Brotherhood, War, and Bluegrass. Crown. Aug. 2010. 272p. ISBN 978-0-307-46306-7. $25. BIOG
Though the face on the cover looks like Barney Fife, this is not the long-awaited biography of Don Knotts but instead the quite interesting examination of two Real American Men from an era that produced Real American Men. Slam through the first 25 pages of long-form family history, and you get a close-up of twin brothers who come from hillbilly land Roanoke, VA-right out of O Brother, Where Art Thou? Clayton and Saford Hall were dudes real enough to put me down on the junior varsity team-rough, hard-workin', and pure hick. They also knew bluegrass and singing and were on their way to really "being somebody" in the music world (akin to the John Mayer of their day) when World War II got in the way. Clayton took his brass balls to the Pacific front and survived the Typhoon of Steel in Okinawa. Saford took his brass balls to fight Germans, at one point tying a thick rope around his waist and swimming across a freezing river to the enemy side. Both return home and work hard. Despite never breaking back into the music business, they live the American Dream. Is there a better way to live? Hot damn!

De Sa, Anthony. Barnacle Love. Algonquin. Aug. 2010. ISBN 978-1-56512-926-9. $13.95. F
The only fitting description of this is "lyrical." Now, I like literary fiction, and I like occasional lyricism (by George Gershwin, for example), but I don't usually go full-out on the lyric front. This is a wonderful, evocative, and quiet read, but there are no explosions, no murders. There are no car chases or graphic sex. In fact, plot seems secondary to mood. De Sa presents a few determined family members bumping up against each other and finding stuff out about themselves. Nothing much really "happens." After his fisherman father drowns, a Portuguese boy named Manuel is groomed by his mom to be...a fisherman. He secretly strives for more and winds up skipping out on the setup. We get a glimmer of his strength and resolve when he returns to bury his mom, but when the story picks up with his own son, we see that he has grown up to be, essentially, nothing-a variant of his own father. Meanwhile, sailors play accordions, angels ride in the back of a dump truck, and a family trip to Niagara Falls goes awry. De Sa shows that a family can interconnect not only with place and circumstance but also sensibility. But could just one thing explode?

Franklin, Tom. Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter. Morrow. Oct. 2010. 288p. ISBN 978-0-06-059466-4. $24.99. F
Franklin's evocative, moody novel is set in rural Mississippi, a red state as alien a place to me as the lunar surface. So while the landscape is unfamiliar (kudzu, armadillos) and the language is, uhh, homey (e.g., the N word and "ax" instead of "ask"), the familiar bits of a mystery are all present: a slowly unraveling plot, a less-than-motivated investigator, a police department that wants the whole thing to go away. It starts off-BLANG!-with the shooting of a loner/weirdo/bad guy. The hero who slowly figures out the particulars of the crime is Silas, a constable known more for his past baseball career than his competence. Franklin laces the book with descriptive appeal, as when Silas "eased up the steps, soft as moss, the porch like a cave, vegetation on all sides and bees boiling out of the white blooms... . Gently, he moved coils of ivy aside and peered through the snakehead kudzu leaves to where the front door was secured with a rusty padlock." The mix of unusual with common makes for a nice read. Sound good? (See also LJ's review in the July issue, posting 7/15/10.)

Furst, Alan. Spies of the Balkans. Random. 2010. 288p. ISBN 978-1-4000-6603-2. $26. F
Furst's strength is his consistency; the dude can really evoke an atmosphere, can describe-really intimately-a situation or an encounter that can only have happened, like, 60 years ago. I don't think of myself as a reader of historical fiction, but I like spy stories, a compelling narrative, World War II plots with the clear good guy/bad guy dynamic, and literate detail. So I like Furst, who makes it easy for me to consider the un-American view, and if there's anything I like, it's a little not-American now and then. These Night Soldiers books are populated with lots of not-Americans, from French cinematographers to Italian journalists to Hungarian ad men. Furst's oeuvre has enough of the familiar to keep me anchored, but enough of the unusual to keep me interested. Spies plunks readerdudes down in early-war Macedonia, a primitive place where a policeman works with undercover supersecret spy types against Benito Mussolini to devise a safe escape route from Germany. Hell, yeah. (See LJ's original review in the May 15, 2010 issue.)

Griswold, Eliza. The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam. Aug. Farrar. 2010. 416p. ISBN 978-0-374-27318-7. $27. REL
"The emir's earthen castle stood atop a hill about five miles above Wase Rock. The clay forecourt swarmed with courtiers in billowing robes, and the clatter of horse hooves range from the royal stable." This 15th-century Moorish scene is actually set in present-day Nigeria; less than 300 miles away is a militarized zone where ethnic groups, police, and the army fight to the death-over oil territory. This kind of conflict is common to the tenth parallel, the imaginary line circling Earth about 700 miles north of the equator. Griswold (Wideawake Field: Poems) paints parts of Africa (in Nigeria, Sudan, and Somalia) and Asia (in Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines) as pressure points between the Muslim and Christian worlds where one's religion is one's physical security and literal salvation. Griswold's highly readable reportage documents and examines conflicts like the powder keg that is Nigeria, where "[b]eing a citizen...means next to nothing; in many regions, the state offers no electricity, water, or education, instead, for access to everything from schooling to power lines, many Nigerians turn to religion. Being a Christian or a Muslim, belonging to the local church or mosque, and voting along religious lines has become the way to safeguard seemingly secular rights." The average American Walmart-going schlump simply cannot fathom the insecurity of life here. (See also LJ's review in the July issue, posting 7/15/10.)

Grossman, Paul. The Sleepwalkers. St. Martin's. Oct. 2010. 320p. ISBN 978-0-312-60190-4. $24.99. F
Debut author Grossman plunks a gumshoe novel within the runaway German political climate of the Third Reich's dawn; it's not a completely successful experiment, but it's a heck of a fun read. Acclaimed Jewish detective Willi Kraus uncovers a scheme in which Those Nazi Bastards are kidnapping people with hypnotic suggestions to be used for medical experiments. I know, Those Nazi Bastards! There's a fleeting bright spot when our hero gets a girlfriend, but wait-she's a hooker. Oh, and she's addicted to heroin. Oh, and then she's used as bait, so she gets hypnotized by Those Nazi Bastards. Willi struggles and fights and gets this close to exposing the awfulness that is Those Nazi Bastards, but then the poop really hits the fan, and he has to get the hell out of the country. (It has something to do with him being Jewish. Anyone have any info on this?) Grossman's copious descriptions of physical geography-streets, rivers, and neighborhoods in Berlin-come off as pretty fascinating instead of deadly dull; readers will keep on asking what happens next. (See also LJ's review in the July issue, posting 7/15/10.)

Lelord, Fran?is. Hector & the Search for Happiness. Penguin. Aug. 2010. 176p. tr. from French by Lorenza Garcia. ISBN 978-0-14-311839-8. $14. F
Written in a deliberately simple and appealing style, this English translation of a best-selling French work reads like a cross between a parable, Milne's Winnie the Pooh books, and the wholly enjoyable Le Petit Nicolas by Ren?Goscinny and Jean-Jacques Semp? Both dry and wry, it's a sophisticated story about the titular Hector, a successful psychotherapist who wonders if he himself is happy. To decide, the headshrinker decides to shrink his own head and embarks on a world trip to figure out what makes people in other cultures happy. As he adventures and ponders things that happen to him, he writes down "Rules of Happiness": "Happiness is Having a Home & Garden of Your Own." "Sometimes Happiness is Not Knowing the Whole Story." "Many people think that Happiness Comes from Having More Power or More Money." Some of Hector's escapades are fun (e.g., he meets a couple of women and "does what people do when they are in love"); some not so much, as when he is captured for ransom by bad men in Africa. The upshot is that dudes don't need to travel the world (or splurge on airfare to Libya via Johannesburg) to learn these valuable lessons-we can just read this little book.

Nadeau, Barbie Latza. Angel Face: The True Story of Student Killer Amanda Knox. Beast Books, dist. by Perseus. 2010. 224p. ISBN 978-0-9842951-3-5. pap. $14.95. TRUE CRIME
Think back to 2008. Remember the name Amanda Knox? She was the 20-year-old American woman put on trial in Italy for the murder of Meredith Kercher, her flatmate. The U.S. press portrayed her as she looked-young, cute, perhaps sexy but wholesome in a Mary Ann from Gilligan's Island kind of way-the titular Angel Face. The truth, as written by Rome-based American journalist Nadeau, is quite different and covers the trial, evidence, and Knox's conviction. It also convincingly concurs with the court's conclusion that Knox sure as hell killed Kercher, probably with help from either one or two men. The forensics report determined strangulation, bruising and scratching, sexual assault, knife wounds, and finally a slit neck. Nadeau's style is at times pedestrian, but the book is also compellingly arranged with enough momentum to keep you turning pages, and enough backstory to keep peeling away the layers of the onion. In all, this book scared the crap out of me. Knox, a bright and academically successful student, was on a hell of a drug bender during the event and the hours beforehand. But what kind of drugs take away your soul?

Roach, Mary. Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void. Norton. 2010. 336p. ISBN 978-0-393-06847-4. $25.95. SCI
This completely awesome book's awesomeness is so awesomely awesome that it's difficult to get across just how awesome it is. It's a fun, intelligent, and engrossing read, something that a dude can get excited about. As a bonus, it considers sex in space, something I think only Kim Stanley Robinson and Barbarella have done. Space work-as in orbiting Earth, going to the moon, or getting to Mars-is quite romantic in the abstract. Think of relaxed, competent Bruce Dern in Silent Running or George Clooney in Solaris. In reality, space stuff is smelly, hot, and gross. Roach insightfully researches and chronicles all sorts of topics, like what happens when you sneeze in a space suit or how NASA uses cadavers to test how crashes affect the body. Roach's greatest plus is how quickly she gets to the proverbial donkey punch on the varying experiments. For example, when NASA tested astronauts' ability to withstand a 20-day mission, they put men close together in a room with no bathing. They found that after about day eight, astronauts' noses sort of stopped working-it went beyond "smelly." Roach tells readers why: B.O. combines with "bodily emanations that have built up on the skin: grease, sweat, and scurf, to be specific." Scurf? It's shed skin. Nice! (See also LJ's review in the July issue, posting 7/15/10.)

Ward, Nathan. Dark Harbor: The War for the New York Waterfront. Farrar. 2010. 272p. ISBN 978-0-374-28622-4. $25.99. HIST
Breathing new life into the history of New York City's docklands, Ward's is a compelling look at waterfront life from the 1930s to the 1950s, when the mob took control of the lucrative trading on the wharves. A lot of dockworkers were trying to make an honest buck, labor unions were bilking those guys out of their honest bucks, mob bosses were stealing these same bucks, and politicos were turning blind eyes. If that sounds like a movie, it is-On the Waterfront, 1954. New York Sun reporter Mike Johnson wrote a series of articles (which won the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting) that linked the mob to some longshoremen's murders; the public scrutiny following those articles (and the fact that shipping via those huge bulk freight containers became economically unfeasible) made the corruption die off some. A former American Heritage and Library Journal editor, Ward anchors the richly detailed narrative in keen profiles of the main players. Interviews with surviving, if somewhat reluctant, Brooklynites, add a nice edge. Analogues to the film are inevitable. There's slick lawyer Jim Longhi (Rod Steiger), longshoreman union boss Joseph Ryan (Lee J. Cobb), local do-gooder priest John Corridan (Karl Malden), and Fred Gwynne, aka Herman Munster as Slim. (See LJ's original review in the April, 15, 2010, issue and our recent interview with Ward.)

Winslow, Don. Savages: A Novel. S. & S. 2010. 320p. ISBN 978-1-4391-8336-6 . $25. F
Initially, I picked this up because I thought the title was Sausages. Ah, well, my chiaroscuro lasagna will have to wait. Violent, poetic, and compelling, this seems like it should be reviewed in "The Word on Street Lit" column of BookSmack! It's about a lot of characters, but the main two guys are Chon and Ben, who grow and sell hydroponic weed in Laguna, CA. Their success becomes their undoing as their little startup bumps up against the big bad Baja Cartel, an absolutely ruthless drug syndicate run by an ice queen named Elena. It's all drugs, guns, murder, death. It's episodic, ugly, unholy, and no one seems to have a soul. All the characters are unlikable, repugnantly honest, and use the same, detached "voice." "Chon goes to the range all the time not because he's preparing for the revolution of the Reconquista, not because he has phallic wet dreams about protecting home and hearth from burglars or home invasion. You gotta love 'home invasions'-we thought it would be Mexicans, turns out it was mortgage companies. Chon likes shooting guns." Thing is, I want to know what happens next. I want to know what happens overall. And I hope like hell that there's some redemption in here somewhere.

* =with the KGB