Cheryl Truman on books

Look, I’m inclined to be sympathetic to people writing about pets: The Truman household hosts five cats and one dog. Our house seems to draw random homeless cats, as if there’s a feline Internet somewhere that daily broadcasts our address with the bulletin: Show up here. They’re easy touches. Shedders and scratchers particularly welcome.

But I’ve not yet descended into Crazy Cat Lady status. I have abundant Lysol, four litter boxes and limits. One of those is that, Marley & Me and The Christmas Day Kitten aside, I’m not a fan of books that feature slobbering and shedding as plot points. When it comes to reading, I prefer your humans just about every time.

So it’s intriguing to go through the week’s haul of books and see how many of them are supposed to be comically endearing books about pets, pets attached to the latest bit of odd humor and pets for the holidays.

To wit:

Hip Hop for Dogs: From Bling to Phat, Your Dog Is One Cool Cat (by Janet Penn, Simon & Schuster, $12.95). No, my dog does not “represent,” and she doesn’t wear enormous tacky earrings that those who see her parade about can call her marginally defamatory names. Really, be grateful that your canine will never see or understand this book, and a little sorry that you will. There’s a line between light-spirited and laborious, and this book is miles beyond that line.

A Dog Named Christmas: A Novel by Greg Kincaid (Doubleday, $14.95). It’s a Lab! But a black Lab, so it’s not Marley! Really, this book has a heart of gold, in that it urges the adoption of shelter dogs in the holiday season, and it’s hard not to love a book that advocates spending a holiday season thinking about something besides the acquisition of more stuff. Still, it’s got rough sledding ahead, because it’s competing with …

Cat Capers: Catitude for Cat Lovers by Gandee Vasan. (Andrews McNeel, $24.99). If you have a great gaping hole waiting for a coffee table book that is largely photos of cats with definitions such as “The cat is not evil; she is badness enhanced,” this one’s waiting for you. Also: “The cat is not lazy; he is motivationally challenged.” You already see this kind of humor on icanhascheezburger.com, which of course is also offering its own book. Me, I am not buying: I am interest-challenged.

The Devious Book for Cats: A Parody (Villard, $16). It’s a parody of those books that purport to teach boys and girls everything they need to know, and which is of course no longer taught because we live in an age in which school children text and IM and live on Facebook and their parents are mindless drones who chaffeur them between select-league athletic events and SAT prep courses. If you understand why this is funny, you still won’t buy the book. Example: An Illustrated Guide to Napping, featuring snoozing, dozing, resting, getting some shut-eye and of course cat-napping. Really, that’s so dull I had to prop my own eyelids open to type to the end of the sentence. Parody is attempted. It is not achieved.

But there’s a bright spot: Michael Schaffer’s upcoming One Nation Under Dog: Adventures in the New World of Prozac-Popping Puppies, Dog-Park Politics, and Organic Pet Food. It’s scheduled for release in March, 2009. We’ll be there.

Well, if not my life, at least my sanity.

Because all I can tell you about the last week, people is: Get your flu shot. None of this nonsense about how the shot makes you sicker than the flu. Because, folks, NOTHING makes you sicker than the flu.

Or the mysterious flu-like illness. Or whatever it was that hit me like a sack of bricks starting last Tuesday.

After the first few days, I found that no matter how bad you feel, you can indeed grow weary of those VH1 tart shows, and you can only watch on-demand South Park and Dave Chappelle reruns so much. Eventually the sound of the television makes you ears ache. (I am now told that was an ear infection.)

So I pulled out True Crime: An American Anthology (Libary of America, $40), edited by Harold Schecter, which was released in September. Starting with such writers as Benjamn Franklin and Abraham Lincoln, the book winds up with Dominic Dunne on the Menendez murders.

In between, there are numerous “trials of the century”: Turns out that many crimes you never heard of, and a few you have, were considered in their day to be the greatest crimes ever. One that you never heard of was the Cleveland serial killer in the ’30s who stalked hobos and those on society’s margins and was probably more sophisticated in his criminal pursuits than Jack the Ripper.

But the highlight of the collection for me was Damon Runyon. I’d read about Damon Runyon and yet never read anything by Damon Runyon. “The Eternal Blonde,” based on the case that inspired The Postman Always Rings Twice — basically, husband done in by conniving wife and her lover — is a treat. “He constantly belittled her. He threatened to blow out her brains. He was a good provider for herself and their nine-year-old daughter, but wouldn’t take her out — so she took to stepping out, as they say. An old, old yarn — Friend Husband is a non-stepper, Friend Wife full of go.”

I also got a fair amount read in The Guersey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, and a few chapters in the new Maisie Dobbs mystery, and enough of Gina Kolata’s Flu to remind myself that at least I didn’t have the Spanish flu of 1918.

But Damon Runyon: Ah, there’s a keeper.

Final Theory is one of those novels that debuted under the radar and then caught a cult-like following of people who rave that it’s one of those books — the late and lamented Common Reader catalog used to call them “read-read” books that readers measure by the number of spellbound days it took them to finish it. (It’s generally two or fewer, just so you know.)

It’s about — wait for it — the notion of hiddey poetry within the equations of physicists. And it’s a thriller. A University of Kentucky press release says it “traces Albert Einstein’s Unified Field Theory through scientific ideas intertwined with FBI gun battles, car chases and a race to stop an experiment that would doom the world.”

Author Mark Alpert will speak at UK’s White Hall Classroom Building on Monday, Oct. 20, at 7 p.m. The event is free, open to the public, and presented by UK’s Gaines center for the Humanities.

The Narcotic Farm, the companion film for the book The Narcotic Farm: The Rise and Fall of America’s First Prison for Drug Addicts (Abrams, $29.95), by Nancy D. Campbell, J.P. Olsen and Luke Walden, will air at 9 p.m. on November 3 on WKLE. KET1 is seen in Lexington on WKLE-TV, Channel 46, which is broadcast on Insight cable channel 12

For addition Kentucky airings of the film, which focuses on Lexington’s former “Narcotic Farm” prison on Leestown Road, go to http://www.itvs.org/shows/broadcast_results.php

Built at the height of the Great Depression for $4 million, “Narco,” a combination prison, rehabilitation center, work program and drug research lab, marked a shift in American thinking about addiction. It provided free, on-demand treatment, called its prisoners “patients” and began an on-site research program into how people become addicted and how drugs work on the brain.

To see my original article on the facility once known in Lexington as “the Narco,” and see a photo slide show, go to:

http://www.kentucky.com/211/story/538870.html

Lincoln books seem an infinitely renewable resource. So, when the time comes, skip the moisture-resistant shiny enclosure. Put a few Lincoln books below, a few above, then shovel some earth. Plant a tree. Play Bette Midler’s Shiver Me Timbers. I’ll go happy.

Really, the Lincoln biography industry seems to be one thing that’s booming in America. List it on the stock market, and you’d see investors come down quickly off this Apocalypse Dow mentality.

A few new contenders in the Lincoln literary sweepstakes:

–The children’s book Lincoln Shot: A President’s Life Remembered (by Barry Denenberg, illustrated by Christopher Bing, Fiewel and Friends, $24.95) is simply appealing as all get-out; if I were a child, or still had young children, I would read this every dya. And it wold be easy enough to find: It’s 17 inches tall. And although this is plainly schoolbook Lincoln for those who may have just graduated Sesame Street, it’s a guilty pleasure for adults as well. Key Lincoln quote: ” … It is a great piece of folly to attempt to make anything out of my early life. It can all be condensed into a simple sentence … the short and simple annals of the poor.”

Nice touch: Four photos of Lincoln, 1860-1865, lined up on page 35. He begins looking rugged, and ends looking rugged and ghastly.

–The upcoming A. Lincoln: A Biography by Ronald C. White Jr. (Random House, upcoming in January, 2009), is being touted as the best biography of Lincoln since David Donald’s Lincoln, which is like saying that the gold standard is being updated. A lovely quote from the Chicago Press and Tribune teaches the always appropriate, always forgotten lesson that in politics, demise is a temporary phenomenon. It’s from November 10, 1858, when Lincoln was in fact far from finished, and it’s the sort of thing you think Hillary Clinton may have framed on a wall somewhere: “Mr. Lincoln is beaten. We know of no better time than the present to congratulate him on the memorable and brilliant canvas he has made. He has created for himself a national reputation that is both envied and deserved; and though he should hereafter fill no official station, he has done the cause of Truth and Justice what will always entitle him to the gratitude of his party … ”

–Who’s your phrasemaker? Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer (HarperCollins, October 28 $27.95) by Fred Kaplan, falls more in the range of 2006’s Lincoln’s Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words, by Douglas L. Wilson. It begins with little Abe attending his first school, in Hardin County, Kentucky. Kaplan takes no prisoners in his introduction, in which he observes that “Lincoln was also the last president whose character and standards in the use of language avoided the distortions and other dishonest uses of language that have done so much to undermine the credibility of national leaders.” Any citizen who has suffered through the verbal swill of this year’s campaigns, both national and state, can appreciate that. In Kentucky alone, our U.S. Senate ads are toxic enough that they will have to be eventually disposed of by hazmat teams.

Essayist David Sedaris — he of Me Talk Pretty One Day, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim and When You Are Engulfed in Flames — is headed to the Singletary Center on Oct. 18. Tickets are $60 and available at www.singletarytickets.com.

Ronald Eller’s discussion of his new book Uneven Ground: Appalachia Since 1945 (University Press of Kentucky), will be taped to air on C-Span’s Book TV. Eller, a University of Kentucky professor and former director of the Appalachian Center, will speak on Oct. 22 at 7 p.m. at Joseph-Beth Booksellers. (Look for a Herald-Leader review by former host of Comment on Kentucky Al Smith on Oct. 19.)

Brian Jacques, author of the Redwall series, is coming to Joseph-Beth on Oct. 23 at 7 p.m. to promote his new book Doomwyte (Philomel Books, $23.99). I’ll be interviewing Jacques by phone next Tuesday, and I don’t know how to begin to express my gratitude for the Redwall series. The books include all manner of conflict and evildoing and bloodshed, and yet there’s a wonderful kind of curl-up-by-the-fire side in which the forest animals care for each other, establish elaborate celebratory rituals and stage sumptuous feasts.

I was rarely more truly at one with my children than when I was reading aloud from Jacques, and to this day we quote a Jacques character whenever the first brisk Kentucky frost blows in: “Brr, zurr!” Probably you had to be there. But Jacques’ Redwall books are much like Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth, pitched toward the elementary school set.

Liza Mundy is a staff writer for The Washington Post, and this is no People-magazine profile featuring a beaming happy family (effortless style! doting husband! adoring children!). The pictures aren’t the most flattering, although the one with Michelle Obama shooting silent death rays at Hillary Clinton is a classic.

The book (Simon & Schuster, $25) veers between slam and idealization. It’s odd, and a little painful, in its striving to put Michelle Obama into a mythological template: “She is outspoken likeable, grounded. She may indeed be quick to find fault — with bosses, with America, whatever — but she is also warm and loyal and, truth be told, not much of a rabble rouser.”

You’re left wondering what’s so bad about rabble-rousing, and why a potential First Lady shouldn’t speak, vigorously and whenever she feels like it, on the issues of the day. Taken out of the context of this being a Michelle Obama book, it’s hard to imagine how the same sentence wouldn’t cover Laura Bush. Or Nancy Reagan.
But then there is the other end of the admiration spectrum there is this, about Michelle Obama’s early legal career:

“At least one person, however, found Michelle a challenge to manage. The head of the marketing group was a partner named Quincy White, whom people in the group referred to, fondly, as “Q.” White, now retired, recalls that he recruited Michelle to the group and endeavored to give her the most interesting work he could find, in part because he wanted to do right by her and see her advance, but also because she seemed perennially dissatisfied.”

So really, she isn’t outspoken. Until she is.

The slim volume also includes a fair amount of amateur psychological analysis and wondering-aloud. This feels like lurching toward a point: “As Barack observed when he met her, Michelle does seem to harbor a sense that things could have so easily gone wrong for her, just as they went wrong for some of the people she grew up with — a sense that if she doesn’t work hard to hold it together, everything could still fall apart. She is also aware that things might have gone badly for Barack if he had done his youthful experimenting in a place other than Hawaii.”

Ah, Hawaii! If you’re going to corrupt your youth, best do it there. Or in Kentucky. We’re also often misportrayed as a land of bucolic simpletons. We can sympathize.

And if you’re feeling that things are bit cringe-y, consider this passage about Barack Obama’s rise to presidential candidacy, which feels as if someone is trying too hard for a transition paragraph in a political profile:

“It was more than a political rise; it was a political levitation. A political teleportation. Obama had been beamed up. He had ascended. Overnight he had become a household name. It’s hard to think of a precedent. What political wife has had to adjust to this much intense publicity and fame, this quickly?”

And the answer is: every single one.

Kentucky, Kentucky’s foremost chronicler of comic culture, is going on tour for his new book, O the Clear Moment. O the Clear Moment is described as “implied autobiography” of “coming-of-age to coming-of-old-age” stories. McClanahan, the author of The Natural Man, is a stitch. You should go.

McClanahan will read on Wednesday, October 8 at 5 p.m. on the 18th floor of Patterson Office Tower at the University of Kentucky. The reading is sponsored by the UK English Department.

McClanahan’s book begins in 1950 with his “personal best great moment” – which of course involves a pair of Kentucky high school basketball players and raw eggs. This is what McClanahan does, the inspired juxtaposition of Kentucky with the ridiulously sublime. It’s not that he’s exactly laughing at Kentucky. Well, sometimes it is, but he’s doing it with great affection.

Here’s Ed’s tour schedule:

October 18: Book Passage @ 4:00pm (Corte Madera, CA)

October 21: Booksmith @ 7:30pm (San Francisco, CA)

November 5: Powell’s Books @ 7:30pm (Portland, OR)

November 7: Fact and Fiction @7:00pm (Missoula, MT)

November 13: Coffee Tree Books @ 7:00pm (Morehead, KY)

November 19: McNally Robinson @ 7:00pm (New York, NY)

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How to Raise a Superchild! Every Parent’s Simple, Step-by-Step Guide (by Ray G. Strobel “and the staff of the American Superchild Institute,” Health Communications, Inc., $12.95) may be one of the worst books I’ve ever seen, and this is being written by someone who (1) got genuinely excited about the arrival of Bret “The Hitman” Hart’s autobiography yesterday and (2) thinks the icanhascheezburger.com LOLcats book may be the answer to all my holiday giving.

So it’s not as if I can’t appreciate a little low-end pop culture, because if Bret Hart can write more than 500 pages about professional wrestling I can completely absorb that 500 pages; wrestling tell-alls are one of the underappreciated genres in literature. And while the perpetrators of this superchildren book may argue that they’re satirizing the crude mentality of the upper-income parents who alway assumes that their kids are not only rich, but brilliant — really, they just want your $12.95.

And it’s not even that I begrudge anybody $12.95 for unfunny humor (raise your child to be a celebrity chef! Pope! billionaire! chess master!), you would hope that any publisher which could manage to press paper together could also afford spell check. Because the occupational hazard of the chess master is spelled “hemorrhoids,” people, not “hemorroids.”

A better choice: Fran Lebowitz knocked off the overstriving parents genre in her short essay, “Vocational Guidance for the Truly Ambitious” now anthologized in The Fran Lebowitz Reader, available for the piddling sum of $10.17 at amazon.com. Lebowitz is a master of compact snark, and her books are things that you will in fact be proud to have on your shelves. This sets them apart from How to Raise a Superchild!, which proves only that the only truly cute chubby-cheeked toddler is the one that belongs to you.

Today’s mail brings Winging It: Dispatches from an (Almost) Empty Nest, by Catherine Goldhammer (Hudson Street Press, $21.95). As demographics go, I suspect that empty-nest memoirs are about to join the me-and-my-dawg and me-and-my-childhood category as Hot Topics for books that you probably won’t read.

And while I am always ready to be cynical, and a tiny book with a $21.95 price tag does nothing to diminish the cynicism – in particular the sentence that begins, somewhat competitively, “Harper was accepted early to her first-choice college,” because a small-minded person might infer that the book is a showcase of the author’s great parenting! a kid with a college early decision! surely no evil will ever visit this house! — Goldhammer turns a wrenching phrase here:

“I began to envision other worlds, other lives, invisible cities, trying futures on for size.  … I thought of going somewhere, visiting my imaginary dwelling places, meeting them like blind dates, listening to their stories of joy and failure, drinking their tea.”

Well, in Kentucky our blind dates don’t usually revolve around pounding down the tea, but still.

Perhaps I find this moving because I am an almost-empty nester myself, although it seems that I am the one person in America who Does Not Have a Book in Me. On the other hand? If empty nesting means that I have wheedled guilt-cash for my last vat of fund-raising cookie dough, wrapping paper or alleged discount cards, empty nesting is surely the answer to my spiritual crisis. There is a God, and His extended title is Outta My Checkbook.

And also …

The New York Times discusses the great comic novels at http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/ and writer David Kelly wonders why there are no women in this comprehensive and ingeniously blog comment-stoking survey of his fellow Times employees. (The most obvious comment-stoking these days belongs to any post about Sarah Palin. Throw up the words “Sarah Palin Sarah Palin Sarah Palin” on a blog, and it’s the automatically the gold standard of viewership. “Sarah Palin,” “Bristol Palin” and “Trig Palin,” we’re talking trifecta. If Sarah Palin had written a novel, Kelly could have readers lining up to comment.)

Because of course the answer about great comic novelists is Nancy Mitford, in Love in a Cold Climate and The Pursuit of Love, although among the Southern bless-your-heart novelists the answer could also be Lee Smith and Jill Conner Browne.  In fact, if there’s a trivia question you want to ask about the 20th century, the Mitford sisters are a pretty good bet. Who was imprisoned for fascist sympathies during World War II? Diana Mitford, who had a new baby at the time. Who shot herself in the head for said sympathies? Unity Mitford. Who muckraked with the best of the muckrakers? Jessica Mitford.

But as anyone who listened to Joyce Carol Oates’ uproarious reading of her story, EDickinson Repliluxe, at the Kentucky Womens Writers conference last week will tell you: Oates works on many levels, one of them being as a completely arch and wildly ruthless social observer. In the story, Emily Dickinson (and other celebrities, among them Babe Ruth) becomes available as a sort of cross between an American Girl doll and an on-demand home companion, available at catalog outlets, warranted and possessing no civil rights. Evil and funny: That’s our Oates.