Cheryl Truman on books

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)

. 

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.

The contenders:

-Miley Cyrus: This Is Her Life (Berkley Boulevard Paperback Original, costing $16 of Mommy’s money and an untold future of humiliation when, in 2035, your now-tween daughter digs this out of your middle school trinkets and cackles like the possessed). The unauthorized biography of the world’s most successful and overexposed teenager breaks the news that other names considered before hitting upon the “Hannah Montana” platinum standard included “Anna Cabana,” “Samantha York,” and “Alexis Texas.” Also: A quiz to determine if you have what it takes to be a FOM (Friend of Miley), and pictures! So very, very many long-maned, toothy pictures!

Killer moment: Page 130-131, the quiz on “Which cause is for you?” Your choices are: visiting sick kids, going green and saving animals. Winning question: “If I see a stray animal in my neighbohood, I … A. want it! B. feel sad!” Living in the state to which Ms. Cyrus is peripherally tied, I can safely answer that if I see a stray animal in my neighborhood, it’s road kill.

Random sentence: “Dressed in supercute polka dots, she happily answered all the reporters’ question before going in to head up an autograph booth.”

Maddening moment: “It was into this tumultuous time that Destiny Hope Cyrus was born, on November 23, 1992, in Franklin, Tennessee.  This “tumultuous time” would be the post-mullet life of Miley’s father, “Achy-Breaky Heart” singer Billy Ray Cyrus.

A happier option: This is why we have People.com, people.

VS.

James Lipton: Inside Inside (New American Library Trade Paperback, $15), from the host of Inside the Actors Studio. Cringe: Lipton’s pandering to the celebrities who have sacrified so much to sit on a stage with him and talk about being Artists makes being tied to a chair during a “Hannah Montana” marathon look downright sweet. Read: Lipton badgering Hugh Grant to emote about Lipton’s beautiful wife! See: Early Lipton in ballet attire. OMG moment: Lipton is an avid pilot, which is actually interesting, because it’s not as if he uses it as a tacky excuse to trot out … oh, wait, there it is: a picture of New York’s Twin Towers from a Lipton-piloted plane!

Authentically funny section: Celebrities’ favorite curse words. Jay Leno wins for “syphilitic druid.” The rest show such a distinct lack of imagination you may find yourself wishing for a campaign to eliminate the letter “f” from the alphabet.

Random sentence: “When Jennifer Lopez accepted the invitation to come to our stage, the Purity Police mobilized in defense of the Inside the Actors Studio principles they suddenly understood and treasured — but had somehow neglected to mention or acknowledge before the perceived barbarian appeared at the gates.” It’s like motion sickness in print.

Maddening moment: Dear Lord, why not an index? Also, the first chapter, which opens with that “glady teche” quote from Chaucer that adorns infinite windowless middle-school teachers’ cinderblock walls: Because you can’t say Meg Ryan, Barbra Streisand and Robin Williams without thinking Chaucer.

A happier option: Lipton wrote a lovely reference book, An Exaltation of Larks: And 1,000 more group terms, real and fanciful, from the 12th to the 21st centuries. Really, an “unction of undertakers” should make your day (unless you’re Miley Cyrus, in which case a cinnamon-scented candle apparently does the trick).

And the winner is: The Divine Miss Cyrus. Supercute polka dots lay the smackdown on Lipton, even with Lipton’s uproarious pleas for a tattoo.

We get a lot of books here, but it has occured to me of late to categorize the most frequently received categories.

Here they are:

–Books about how your pet reveals to you the subtle truths of life itself. These include “funny” stories about pets that yawn on for tens of pages at a crack and wander eventually onto some life-affirming moment, although not until after you’ve said, geez, where is my National Enquirer; people write about their animals, but manage to keep in mind that really, it’s all about their own unbearable poignant self-awareness; and those who are convinced that Marley and Me, despite its bazillion years on the bestseller lists and upcoming movie starring Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston, was not the best, most profiable word on big foolish golden dogs. Or little spunky terriers. SUBSET: Dogs in the city!

-Stunt books that consistent entirely of the mind-numbing confessions of an individuals who would be better off reading a book rather than writing one. Reading the dictionary. Living Biblically. Attaining a bizarre level of public intimacy with your spouse. I promise you, your battles with infertility are not that fascinating, even to your in-laws.

–Lincoln. And by the way, upcoming: Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer, by Fred Kaplan, in November. New on the shelves: Tried By War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief by James M. McPherson. The reddeming virtue of any book about Lincoln is that the subject matter is a man who would never have engaged in a stunt book.

–Self-published books by those convinced that their childhood was unique and should be hugely personally profitable because it was great, yet it was bad, and they faced challenges, but there were fine sunshine-soaked days. Also, their mom was the greatest ever. The thing is: Each and every person on earth, except perhaps Augusten Burroughs, had the same childhood. You don’t have to write about it: Really, we’ll just take your word.

–

Joyce Carol Oates will speak, along with Isabella Moon author Laura Benedict, at the Kentucky Women’s Writers conference free event at UK’s Memorial Hall at 7:30 p.m. Friday.

I could try to turn a phrase here, but won’t. You can call Oates’ work literary rococo, you can measure it by its tonnage: Doesn’t matter. Oates is a genius. Genius doesn’t come to town every day.

Constantine Rafinesque

State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of  America

(EccoBooks, $29.95) features essays by edgy writers on our 50 states (Dave Eggers on Illinois, Ha Jin on Georgia, Kevin Brockmeier on Arkansas). Here’s Jhumpa Lahiri on Rhode Island: “My father, a global traveler, considers Rhode Island paradise.” 

Flipping over to the state that houses us here at Humidity Central, we find John Jeremiah Sullivan writing on Kentucky, “shaped like an alligator’s head.” But really, he is writing about Constatine Rafinesque, which is simultaneouly intriguing and disappointing: intriguing, because Rafinesque’s “curse” on what is now Transylvania University when he stomped off is the stuff of legend, and disappointing, because Rafinesque stomped off, went crazy and laid down the mojo in the early 19th century. You could pretty easily infer that not much of value has happened since in our little corner of Amurca. But Rafinesque: Kentucky’s Darwin! Audubon’s travelling partner! A brilliant mind with no qualms at all about making stuff up! 

Sadly, the Aububon partnership ended rather badly, as Sullivan notes that one fine evening Audubon “woke to uproar. Hurtling through Rafinesque’s door he found the smaller man leaping naked in the dark, holding the neck of Audubon’s Stradivarius, which he’d bashed to splinters trying to stun small bats.”

So, Constantine Rafinesque: Here’s to you. Although Kentucky is known to many for truly awful reasons, your bat-bashing example humbles us.