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Books Update from NYTimes.com
Books Update from NYTimes.com
Books Update: A Long Way From Tacoma
Date: Fri, 9 Feb 2001 22:59:49 -0500
From: The New York Times Direct
To: medei@UOL.COM.BR
Friday, February 9, 2001
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A Long Way From Tacoma
1. In Sunday's Book Review: Gary Giddins's "Bing Crosby"
2. Also Reviewed This Week: Amitav Ghosh's "The Glass Palace"
3. Audio Reading: W. H. Auden
4. New in Stores: Julian Barnes's "Love, Etc."
5. In the News: Dispute Over Authorship of a Prizewinning Memoir
6. New on the Best-Seller List
7. In the Forums: Herman Melville's "The Confidence-Man"
1. In Sunday's Book Review: Gary Giddins's "Bing Crosby"
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February 11, 2001
A Long Way From Tacoma
In the first volume of Gary Giddins's biography, Bing Crosby goes from vaudeville to Hollywood stardom.
BING CROSBY
Related Links
A Pocketful of Dreams. The
Early Years, 1903-1940.
By Gary Giddins.
Illustrated. 728 pp.
Boston:
Little, Brown & Company. $30.
Janet Maslin Reviews 'Bing Crosby' (Feb. 1, 2001)
First Chapter: 'Bing Crosby'
"Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams. The Early Years, 1903-1940," by Gary Giddins
"Four men dominate the history of popular singing in the
20th century. (If you want to double the number, throw in
the Beatles). They were Al Jolson, Bing Crosby, Frank
Sinatra and Elvis Presley, and during the period of their
ascendancy they not only led the way, they were the way,"
writes Robert Gottlieb, editor of "Reading Jazz."
Though the more than 700 pages of ''Bing Crosby: A Pocketful
of Dreams'' tell only half the story, the years from 1903 to
1940, the book offers a valuable re-assessment of Crosby's
career. "This new account may at moments overinflate
Crosby's significance," says Gottlieb, "But when the facts
are unpretty we aren't spared them. Most of all, though,
Giddins is in love with Crosby the singer, and here his
knowledge of popular singing gives his book the weight and
value that no other account commands. Gary Giddins has
performed a great service in tracking Crosby's life and
career so scrupulously."
2. Also Reviewed This Week: Amitav Ghosh's "The Glass Palace"
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February 11, 2001
There'll Always Be an England in India
Amitav Ghosh's novel traces the impact of colonialism on middle-class
society.
THE GLASS PALACE
Related Link
By Amitav Ghosh.
474 pp. New York:
Random House. $25.95.
First Chapter: 'The Glass Palace'
Amitav Ghosh is one of the many Indian writers to have
emerged in the 1980's after the publication of Salman
Rushdie's ''Midnight's Children," according to our reviewer,
novelist Pankaj Mishra, author of ''The Romantics." "There
isn't much easy politics or sermonizing in his work; there
is, instead, a concern for the individual, a curiosity about
the workings of alien societies and, often, an honest
examination of colonial neuroses," writes Mishra. "In this,
as in his preference for a plain ungimmicky prose, Ghosh
follows the example of V. S. Naipaul, although his instinct
for storytelling on a grand scale owes much more to Gabriel
Garcia Marquez."
Ghosh's fourth novel is also his most ambitious, Mishra
concludes, though there are flaws. "Ghosh's inquiry loses
its focus, however, as he alternates accounts of passionate
sex on beaches and in forests with set pieces about battles
and migrations. The narrative goes into the epic mode too
often, and the prose, while lazily reaching out for the
ready-made phrase often comes dangerously close to kitsch."
http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/02/11/reviews/010211.11mishrat.html?0209bk
First Chapter: 'The Glass Palace'
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February 11, 2001
Buff and Ready
Many men today go to inordinate lengths to improve their appearance.
LOOKING GOOD
"Looking Good: Male Body Image in Modern America," by Lynne Luciano
Male Body Image in Modern America.
By Lynne Luciano.
Illustrated. 259 pp.
New York: Hill &
Wang. $25.
Luciano's ''Looking Good'' shows how changes in male body
image, "though drastic over the long term, have come about
so gradually that we've simply taken them in stride," writes
Holly Brubach, the author of ''Girlfriend: Men, Women and
Drag'' and ''A Dedicated Follower of Fashion.'' "All the
more reason, then, to welcome a book that could give us some
insight into the cumulative cultural weight of such
phenomena as hair transplants, penile implants, bodybuilding
and Viagra. What Luciano does best is to synthesize
information, much of it from disparate sources, both
highbrow and pop."
First Chapter: 'Looking Good'
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"The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World Is Still the Least Valued," by Ann Crittenden
"As Ann Crittenden argues in her powerful and important new
book, the choice to become a mother in America today imposes
enormous costs on most women, including lower incomes and
higher risks of poverty than men or childless women face,"
writes reviewer Paul Starr, professor of sociology at
Princeton University and a co-editor of The American
Prospect.
Crittenden, a former reporter for The New York Times, worked
on the book for five years, conducting interviews, attending
conferences and court proceedings and synthesizing research
in economics, law, history and sociology. "The result is a
work that is as informative and engaging in its details as
it is compelling in its overall argument."
3. Audio Reading: W. H. Auden
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In this audio recording from 1972, W. H. Auden reads 14 of
his poems, including "Epistle to a Godson" and "The Fall of
Rome."
http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/02/11/specials/auden.html?0209bk
"Lectures on Shakespeare," by W. H. Auden
This book is derived from a 1946 series of lectures that
Auden gave at the New School in New York City. As poet
William Logan writes, "The young Auden was, by all accounts,
an engaging speaker (by the end of his life his readings had
become mostly mumbles), and we owe the preservation of these
lectures to the meticulous note-taking of a few devoted
students. The Shakespeare lectures are rambling and
sociable, subject to seat-of-the-pants judgments that are at
times whimsical and perverse."
The main problem, though, is that the lectures are
"reconstructed" from student notes, and "even a student with
an accurate ear fails to take down half of what he hears. We
must beware of taking these inventions as the lectures Auden
gave, however, especially where they have been padded out by
pilfering from his essays or making an educated guess about
his choice of quotations."
4. New in Stores: Julian Barnes's "Love, Etc."
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"Love, Etc.," by Julian Barnes, February 6
In his new book, Barnes revives characters from his 1991
novel, "Talking It Over."
5. In the News: Dispute Over Authorship of a Prizewinning Memoir
===========================================================
"Notes From the Hyena's Belly," by Nega Mezlekia, an
Ethiopian civil engineer living in Toronto, is a piercing
memoir of his youth in his war-wracked native land. But an
editor of the book says she is its real author.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/05/arts/05MEMO.html?0209bk
For a digest of this week's book news, visit:
http://www.nytimes.com/books/yr/mo/day/daily/index.html?0209bk
6. New on the Best-Seller List
==============================
Hardcover Fiction
#2) "The Cat Who Smelled a Rat," by Lilian Jackson Braun
Jim Qwilleran and his two cats probe a string of deadly
catastrophes.
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 Feb. 18 and are based on sales through
last weekend.
7. In the Forums: Herman Melville's "The Confidence-Man"
=====================================================
The Reading Group is discussing the February book, Herman
Melville's "The Confidence-Man." Readers are trying to
figure out whether Melville is satirizing the con man or his
dupes -- or both, or neither. One reader, suggesting that
the con man is the main object of satire, explains it this
way: "Melville particularly enjoyed using Christian
convention against Christians' hypocrisy in praise of
tougher, truer versions of Christian virtues."
The group has also been examining the form of the novel,
which consists of a series of episodes in which the con man
tricks a victim. In addition to finding precedents in
morality plays and picaresque tales, readers have been
making connections between this structure and
existentialism's emphasis on repetition.
One reader writes, "The suggestion at the end of the book
that the masquerade simply continues on, ad nauseam, with
the only thing worth celebrating the story-telling artistry
itself, seems a remarkably modern attitude." And one reader
throws down the gauntlet and promises to make the case that
"The Confidence-Man" is "the first modern novel."
http://www.nytimes.com/books/forums/index.html?0209bk
