Seleções PenAzul
Books Update from NYTimes.com
Friday, May 4, 2001
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A Special Baseball Issue
1. In Sunday's Book Review: Roger Angell's "A Pitcher's Story"
2. Also Reviewed: "Carry Me Across the Water" by Ethan Canin
3. Featured Author: Margaret Drabble
4. New in Stores: Daniel Schorr's "Staying Tuned"
5. In the News: Tara Plantation, the Downstairs Version
6. New on the Best-Seller List: Stuart Woods's "Cold Paradise"
7. In the Forums: The Reading Group Discusses Jane Jacobs
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1. In Sunday's Book Review: Roger Angell's "A Pitcher's Story"
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Imperfect Games
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Roger Angell hung out with David Cone during his worst season in the majors.
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A PITCHER'S STORY
Innings With David Cone.
By Roger Angell.
290 pp. New York:
Warner Books. $24.95.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Roger Angell, The New Yorker writer, arranged to follow
pitcher David Cone for the 2000 baseball season. Pete
Hamill, reviewing the book that has resulted, notes that
Angell, 81, has been watching baseball since he was a child
in the late 1920's and writing about it "with style and
precision" for almost 40 years in The New Yorker. "Now he
wanted to go deeply into the mind of the game's most crucial
player, the pitcher. The 37-year-old Cone seemed to be the
perfect subject. He was intelligent, analytical and
experienced," Hamill writes.
Unfortunately, "the 2000 season was David Cone's Job year.
The baseball divinities were cruel and vindictive, as if
punishing him for the ancient sin of chutzpah." Angell uses
"plain, graceful prose to tell the complex tale of Cone's
season without ever falling into glib psychobabble or wormy
sentimentality. He is a fan, hardly objective, but he is not
a publicist. Along the way, he gets everyone to talk: Cone's
wife, Lynn; old friends; retired pitchers; Cone's first
girlfriend; family members; [Joe] Torre. The warts in the
portrait are given their proper place. But David Cone is
always firmly at the heart of Angell's tale. And reality
allows both men one final moment of sheer redemptive magic."
Baseball Books
This special section includes reviews of other new baseball
books by Don Zimmer, Steve Fainaru and Ray Sanchez and
others. Also included are links to baseball book features
from previous years and a baseball book reading list,
selected by Joe Torre, Roger Kahn, Vin Scully and Roger
Angell.
Related Links
* Michiko Kakutani Reviews 'A Pitcher's Story' (May 1, 2001)
* First Chapter: 'A Pitcher's Story'
Special Section
* Baseball Books
2. Also Reviewed: "Carry Me Across the Water" By Ethan Canin
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In the third novel by Ethan Canin, a Harvard Medical School
graduate who became a full-time writer, a 78-year-old
protagonist senses death approaching -- and memories erupt.
As reviewer Gary Krist writes, "When it comes to
jump-starting the intricate machinery of recollection,
there's nothing more effective than the sense of approaching
death."
August Kleinman, a former brewery owner, is "a character
rich in suggestive contradictions," and as Canin recounts
episodes from Kleinman's life "the effect is cinematic,
occasionally disorienting, yet also strangely elegiac." The
book itself is short, and "it remains, despite its narrative
sweep of time and geography, something of a chamber piece .
. . that evokes intense and somber emotions."
http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/05/06/reviews/010506.06kristst.html?0504bk
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============================================================
"Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett: 1921-1960"
Edited by Richard Layman with Julie M. Rivett
The Original Thin Man
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A collection of his letters reveals Dashiell Hammett to have been his own best protagonist.
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SELECTED LETTERS OF DASHIELL HAMMETT 1921-1960.
Edited by Richard Layman with Julie M. Rivett. Introduction by Josephine Hammett Marshall.
Illustrated. 650 pp. Washington:
Counterpoint. $40
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The mystery of Dashiell Hammett keeps growing," writes
reviewer David Thomson, the biographer of Orson Welles. "I
refer to the sometime Pinkerton detective, the consumptive
and the drunk, the brief pioneer of noir writing, the author
who got confused with one of his characters (the Thin Man);
and then the stalwart, the bleak defier of McCarthy and the
jailbird."
Not even "Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett" -- edited by
his biographer, Richard Layman, and his granddaughter, Julie
M. Rivett, with a fond introduction by his daughter
Josephine Hammett Marshall -- is going "to settle all the
puzzles about Hammett. But the emerging portrait is more
than ever a hero for sour times: a laconic gentleman, brave
and tough and honest," Thomson says. "A dry fatalism in the
letters sent me back to the novels and their absence of
mercy," he writes, and concludes that the letters reopen the
puzzle: "A minor writer, they say? Or a man for whom writing
was a thin trick?"
Related Link
* First Chapter: 'Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett'
============================================================
"Goats"
By Mark Jude Poirier
This "engaging and unusual" first novel, writes Tom Perrotta
(the author of "Election" and other books, chronicles the
main character's first year at Gates Academy, an exclusive
prep school in Pennsylvania. "While one might imagine that a
14-year-old stoner from Tucson would have a rough time
making the transition to an academically rigorous all-boys'
boarding school thousands of miles from home," the
protagonist, Ellis Whitman, "handles the move with typical
aplomb, suffering minimal homesickness and effortlessly
acing his classes."
In Perrotta's view, Poirier, the auhor of the well-received
story collection "Naked Pueblo," is a "distinctive writer,
adept at both social satire and a druggy lyricism
reminiscent of Denis Johnson and the early Thomas McGuane.
His imagery is blunt and often memorable," though at times
"Poirier leans a bit too heavily on what starts to feel like
a reflexive seediness." Despite "its occasional excesses,"
Perrotta writes, "Goats" is a "hard-edged, clear-eyed
coming-of-age novel shot through with unexpected flashes of
tenderness."
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A Heart so White and Dark Back of Time
By JAVIER MARÍAS
Reviewed by WENDY LESSER
Stranger Than Fiction
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Two novels by an enigmatic Spanish author explore past and present.
A HEART SO WHITE
By Javier Marías.
Translated by Margaret Jull Costa.
279 pp. New York:
New Directions. $24.95
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DARK BACK OF TIME
By Javier Marías.
Translated by Esther Allen.
336 pp. New York:
New Directions. $27.95.
"When you take up a Marías novel . . . you are at once enclosed in a strange world that becomes increasingly and addictively familiar. . . . Marías's challenging and seductive technique reaches its pinnacle in 'A Heart So White.'"
Related Links
* First Chapter: 'A Heart so White'
* First Chapter: 'Dark Back of Time'
3. Featured Author: Margaret Drabble
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The central character of "The Peppered Moth," Margaret
Drabble's new novel, is based on the author's mother, who
died in 1982. Daphne Merkin, a staff writer for The New
Yorker and author of the novel "Enchantment," says that
"most writers don't bother much with the increasingly fine
(some might say vanished) line between fiction and
nonfiction. So there is something touchingly ingenuous about
the tug of war that pulls Margaret Drabble every which way"
in this book. "The conflict exerts discernible pressure on
Drabble's literary control, and raises still pertinent
questions about the limits of creative license."
In Merkin's view, "Drabble's intensely conflicted feelings
about her own mother -- which, on the evidence of this book,
lean more toward hostility than affection -- ripple
throughout 'The Peppered Moth.'" Though she "hasn't been
able to see her way clear to rendering her main character
with her usual conviction," Merkin writes, "I must also
point out that 'The Peppered Moth' is one of the more
absorbing novels I have read in a long time, both for its
sheer storytelling ability and for its powers of imaginative
conjecture."
http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/05/06/reviews/010506.06merkint.html?0504bk
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Featured Author: Margaret Drabble
This feature includes collected reviews of Drabble's
previous books and articles written by Drabble for The
Times.
4. New in Stores: Daniel Schorr's "Staying Tuned"
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"Staying Tuned: A Life in Journalism," by Daniel Schorr -- May
Daniel Schorr has written a memoir of his years as an on-air
reporter for CBS, CNN and National Public Radio. In her
review for The Times this week, Janet Maslin said that
Schorr's book offers "a guided tour through the lost world
of broadcast journalism as a brand-new and serious business.
And there is much about his firsthand experience that is
worth knowing and evocatively recalled."
5. In the News: Tara Plantation, the Downstairs Version
=======================================================
"The Wind Done Gone," Alice Randall's retelling of "Gone
With the Wind," has sparked a rethinking of Tara, 65 years
after Margaret Mitchell created her defining portrait of the
Southern plantation house.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/03/living/03WIND.html?0504bk
For a digest of this week's book news, visit:
http://www.nytimes.com/books/yr/mo/day/daily/index.html?0504bk
6. New on the Best-Seller List
==============================
Hardcover Fiction
#8) "Cold Paradise," by Stuart Woods
The lawyer and investigator Stone Barrington travels to Palm
Beach to help a beautiful woman.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/yr/mo/day/bsp/index.html?0504bk
A note on our best-seller policy: The Times on the Web
publishes the New York Times best-seller lists a week in
advance of the printed Sunday Book Review. The best-seller
lists published this week on the Web will appear in the
print edition dated May 13 and are based on sales through
last weekend.
7. In the Forums: Jane Jacobs's "The Death and Life of Great American Cities"
======================================================
The Reading Group has begun its discussion of the May book,
Jane Jacobs's 1961 urban planning treatise, "The Death and
Life of Great American Cities." The first reaction of many
city-dwellers seems to be pleasure at Jacobs's lyrical
evocations of city life. One reader felt validated to
realize that "being in love with the city is not such a
crazy thing as so many of our fellow citizens who live in
the 'burbs seem to think." Several people began assessing
recent development projects in their own cities, and most
could think of cases in which Jacobs's theories have been
successfully applied. In the words of one reader, "Thanks to
Jacobs and others, urban planning is now a more complex and
mature field than before." One reader defended Lewis
Mumford, one of the theorists whose work Jacobs criticizes,
arguing that "Mumford hadn't sold out the city" and that
there "very salient reasons for zoning," despite Jacobs's
arguments for mixed use neighborhoods.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/forums/index.html?0504bk
Those of you who live in the New York area might want to
watch to my weekly appearance on WNBC's "Saturday Today in
New York" (Channel 4, 9-10:30 a.m.). During this Saturday's
segment, I interview Mary Higgins Clark, whose novel "On The
Street Where You Live" is number one on The Times's fiction
best-seller list this week. Please let me know your
reactions if you have a chance to tune in. The videos of my
last few television appearances are available on a Web site
jointly created by The Times and WNBC:
http://www.wnbc.com/bookreview/weekend.html
I appreciate your taking the time to read this e-mail. Feel
free to forward it to a friend, and to drop me a note with
your feedback about the site. I enjoy hearing your opinions,
ideas and suggestions and will do my best to respond
individually to each e-mail.
Bill Goldstein
Books Editor
The New York Times on the Web
bill@nytimes.com
About the Books Section
------------------------------
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