The Headboard Reviews - 2010

The Civil War of 1812
Alan Taylor

And why was the War of 1812 a civil war? Because, in the analysis of Alan Taylor, it was only as a consequence of the war that national differences hardened to the point where Canada and the United States could be described as truly separate nations. Given his focus on shifting identities - British subjects, American citizens, Irish rebels, and Indian allies - what Taylor provides is not a general account of the conflict but rather a "borderlands history" that sticks mainly to the action on the frontiers of Lakes Erie and Ontario. A thorough exploration of many important themes, only slightly flawed by the author's weird conclusion that the United States won. 

Sex, Lies and Pharmaceuticals
Ray Moynihan and Barbara Mintzes

Those who suspect that the pharmaceutical industry is sometimes in the business of developing drugs in search of a disease will find those suspicions confirmed in this account of the selling of a new medical condition: female sexual dysfunction (FSD). In a way disturbingly reminiscent of the medicalization of mental health (see my review of Anatomy of an Epidemic), the over diagnosis of FSD has been spurred by aggressive marketing campaigns promoting the quick fix of pricey patches and pills. Despite over a decade of best efforts (including clear cases of conflict of interest for many "thought leaders" in the field receiving industry funding), it is, however, still unclear what FSD even is, or what a safe and effective treatment for it might be. The authors encourage us to remain skeptical.

Infidels
Andrew Wheatcroft

Looking back on the time I spent at university studying English, one thing I'm really glad about is that I didn't bother reading much critical theory. This was because I didn't think post-structuralism or deconstruction, as I understood them, had much to say about literature. In a general history of the conflict between Christendom and Islam they have even less application, though Andrew Wheatcroft tries his best to involve Lacan, Derrida, Genette and the rest. The book's emphasis is on the words and images used to describe the Other, with the clash of civilizations seen through the lens of culture. A worthwhile approach, though one that doesn't result in any particularly new conclusions.

Third World America
Arianna Huffington

Just to explain a few terms that are generic to potboilers like this: America is becoming a Third World country because of its collapsing infrastructure, dysfunctional political system, and growing gap between rich and poor. This has resulted in the squeezing of the middle class (a self-defined group) and a betrayal of the American dream of upward mobility through hard work and determination. The solution is to get rid of lobbyists, have more effective government regulation, invest in jobs and education, and think positive. All of which, quoting Leonard Cohen, is stuff that everybody knows. 

The Anthologist
Nicholson Baker

Calling a poet old-fashioned may seem a bit redundant these days, but in the case of Paul Chowder it's particularly apt. His taste for conventional poetic forms (he's an advocate of rhyme and the four-stress line) makes him feel like he's outside the mainstream, and middle-age has him wondering if he's past his prime. Throw in getting dumped by his girlfriend and things really aren't looking good. Baker's signature style - a stream of what seem like creative writing exercises on mundane observations - becomes for Chowder a method of procrastination, if not repression. We start to question how honest he is being not only with us but with himself. Is he accident prone or into self-mutilation? Even poetry has its hidden costs.

Late Victorian Holocausts
Mike Davis

I would have preferred reading a condensed version of this important work (one with less about the global weather patterns that Davis does a poor job of explaining anyway), but I still came away impressed by its detailed account of how interlocking economic and natural forces created, at the end of the nineteenth century, the third world. Also interesting, reading it today, were the foreshadowings of arguments later made by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine and Jared Diamond in Collapse. The depressing conclusion seems to be that there is no moral or political limit to systems of exploitation that we (at least in the West) now take for granted.

On Deep History and the Brain
Daniel Lord Smail

Deep (a.k.a. Long or Big) History steps way back to take all of human development into consideration. In quest of a seamless narrative connecting such a large span of time, Daniel Lord Smail proposes making the brain the focus of the story. After a fascinating tour of historiography in relation to the "time revolution" of the 1860s (when the metaphorical bottom dropped out of our sense of the past), Smail provides an example of how his "new neurohistory" might work by looking at the biological and cultural evolution of various psychotropic mechanisms. Just a sketch, but it does put some interesting ideas in play.

Zombie
Joyce Carol Oates

A novel (however loosely) based on the horrific crimes of Jeffrey Dahmer is clearly open to charges of sensationalism. And even a writer capable of composing at the speed and with the apparent ease of Joyce Carol Oates might be accused of slumming it in the genre of PsychoLit. Still, if you're going to do it then it ought to be done well, and Zombie delivers with a brisk, compelling portrait in the first-person. I'm sure a big part of the attraction in such a subject is the freedom it gave Oates to let her hair down, which she does in a number of fresh and creative ways. A guilty, B-movie pleasure, then, for everyone.

The Far Side of the Dollar
Ross MacDonald

Lew Archer finds himself once again tracking a squalid family history thick with Freudian droppings in this late effort. Perhaps too late, as Archer in '60s California seems as out of his element as Poirot in swinging London. The story has some strong elements, and the passions at the core of the drama are quite powerful, but Archer's paternalism plays false. As for the kids these days, MacDonald's young people are rarely realistically or sympathetically presented, I think mainly because he tries too hard for both qualities. It all makes for an uneven ride, but there's a lot here for fans to savour.

The Korean War
Bruce Cumings

Taking as a starting point the Korean War's reputation as America's "forgotten war," this short history casts the conflict largely in terms of memory, pitting the North's "party of memory" (remembering the war against Japanese imperialism) against the South's " party of forgetting" (who soft-pedaled their collaborative history with the same). Also important is the memory of war crimes committed by both sides, kept alive through the South's ongoing truth and reconciliation movement. A highly original account that provides a larger cultural history of the war, relating it to McCarthyism and the birth of the military-industrial complex in the U.S. and casting a cold eye on American involvement in general.

Mao Zedong
Jonathan Spence

The Penguin series of brief lives tries to boil biography down to its essence. So what is China historian Jonathan Spence's verdict on one of the colossal monsters of the twentieth century? A strangely detached one. Apparently Mao was just out of touch, "more and more divorced from any true reality check" around the time of the launching of the Great Leap Forward. While I understand Spence's desire to avoid putting Mao on the couch, this sounds almost apologetic and one feels a need for a deeper critical analysis of Mao's personality. At what point did the chip on his shoulder about being a hick from the provinces, which is where I think it all started, turn into a big stick? 

Heartless
Michele R. McPhee

In a competitive consumerist society like ours we really hate those who cheat and live beyond their means. And so our guilty fondness for tales of perfect, happy lives (the tech industry job, the BMW SUV, the McMansion in the upscale suburb) revealed to be rotten at the core. I first became interested in the story of Neil Entwistle's murder of his wife and infant daughter after reading Jonathan Raban's essay "Just Two Clicks" in the London Review of Books. This downscale version ("To have. To hold. To kill?") is part of the St. Martin's True Crime series. The cover became unglued and fell off before I could even finish it, which didn't take long. Published ahead of Entwistle's trial, this was obviously a rush job not given to drawing carefully considered conclusions, and barely passes muster even for true crime buffs. 

Cover Her Face
P. D. James

"Of course," the composed killer confesses at the end. "Think it out for yourself. Who else could it have been?" Well, at least three or four other people, by my count. But Chief-Inspector Adam Dalgliesh, making his first appearance in this 1962 title, pulls a rabbit out of a hat to solve what is a very traditional, locked-room, manor-house murder mystery, figuring out whodunit despite a near total lack of evidence and motive. A competent, but not very impressive debut for an author who would go on to greater things.

The Most Powerful Idea in the World
William Rosen

One would have thought that the ability to clearly describe how a steam engine works would be an essential prerequisite for writing a popular account of the power and personalities behind the industrial revolution, but William Rosen disappoints in this and other regards. In tracking the course of what was arguably the most important development in human history since the domestication of crops in the Fertile Crescent, Rosen seeks to answer the question of why so much innovation occurred in the English-speaking world (answer: democracy and liberal capitalism provided the incentive to invent). It's a vital story for our times, but one with a familiar thesis that is spread too thin here.

The Hellenistic Age
Peter Green

The genre of brief history is hard to get right. The goal is to provide a a focused distillation of salient points and give a general overview of the terrain. Peter Green's account of the classical world from Alexander to Augustus - 336 to 30 BCE - gets it half right. On main currents in cultural and political life he is astute and observant, especially when outlining the shift from public-spiritedness to a new emphasis on private life. But the presentation too often gets bogged down in tedious, mostly inconsequential, and finally incomprehensible dynastic squabbles that would be difficult to fully comprehend even in a volume much longer than this. Still less would have been more.

The Decline of the West
Oswald Spengler

Northrop Frye said he slept with this book under his pillow for years, and it's not hard to see why. Spengler writes in the same great tradition of mythic or visionary history - a description of large historical patterns (Spengler's "morphologies") un concerned with messy details - that Frye adopted for his own magisterial study of the historical modes of literature. The poetry I found to be lost in translation, and I didn't buy the taxonomy of cultures at all, but as the last gasp of German idealism this is a book whose main thesis - that cultures exhaust themselves through an organic process of decay - still feels right. Certainly not the last word on civilization's decline and fall, but an interesting point of departure for further speculation. 

The Ghosts of Cannae
Robert L. O'Connell

The epic battle that saw a massive Roman army turned into something "in excess of six million pounds of human meat left to rot in the August sun" of Cannae gets the full treatment here in what is essentially a general history of the Second Punic War. O'Connell's focal point is Hannibal's famous victory in 216 BC, but he also goes on to describe Rome's comeback (which he casts as the revenge of Cannae's survivors, the legiones Cannenses being the "ghosts of Canne"), and the battle's legacy, which he sees as having opened the door for the eventual destruction of the Republic, with Publius Cornelius Scipio (later Africanus) playing the role of man on horseback. An accessible study aimed at non-specialists, but still the kind of thing only likely to appeal to hardcore fans of military history.

Zomnibus
Various authors and artists

As with any horror convention, the zombie genre has certain well-established rules. So well-established that when first confronted with the living dead, most characters instantly recognize what is going on from the movies they've seen and conduct themselves accordingly. The first two stories in this slick trilogy - "Feast" and "Eclipse of the Undead" - follow the script pretty closely, with their teams of survivors banding together to try and survive a zombie apocalypse. "Zombies vs. Robots," rounds things off with a bonkers plot (strikingly rendered by artist Ashley Wood) that takes the franchise in some different directions. Tradition is good, but zombies are always in need of fresh blood.

Why Socrates Died: Dispelling the Myths
Robin Waterfield

Why? Because Athens, fresh after losing the Peloponnesian War and overthrowing the rule of the Thirty Tyrants, was looking to settle some scores. And so the cranky sophist with a knack for getting under people's skin was hauled in front of the House Committee on Un-Athenian Activities - the charge was "impiety," which in this case seems to have meant a history of oligarchic tendencies - to explain himself. This he did in characteristic fashion. The jury was not amused. The main myth being dispelled in Waterfield's account is Plato's, but really there is little new here in what amounts to a general backgrounder on the crisis in Athenian society during and after the war with Sparta. 

Globish: How the English Language Became the World's Language
Robert McCrum

What might have been an interesting short essay on the globalization of the English language, "contagious, adaptive, populist and subversive," expands into a general history of the English-speaking peoples in this far-ranging and superficial survey. Though it comes to life briefly at the end, most of it is surprisingly dull and pointless, especially coming from as intelligent and insightful a writer as McCrum. An update, but in no other way an improvement on The Story of English, a book he co-authored 25 years ago. 

The Torture Garden
Octave Mirbeau

Leave it to a Frenchman to come up with an intellectualized version of Hostel (circa 1899) complete with decadent Europeans enjoying lives shows of Chinese snuff presented as an allegory of colonialism. Like Conrad's Heart of Darkness (to which it has often been compared), the stain of horror spreads, until the garden becomes a symbol "of the entire earth" with its "passions, appetites, greed, hatred, and lies." One of the most bizarre books I've read in a while, though the experience was almost ruined by the vile English edition. The aestheticization of violence and blending of torture with horticulture I thought almost de rigueur, but the character of Clara - not a sadist but a voyeur - was fascinating. Her constant humiliation of the narrator and priestess-like role in the proceedings are mysterious and disturbing. A female Kurtz? Not quite, but also something more than a Venus in silks.

God Is.
David Adams Richards

The title of this little book, complete with punctuation, explains a lot. It is not an invitation to debate - that is explicitly foreclosed - or an argument for the existence of God. God is rather a function of faith. The need to have faith in Something (Richards is comfortable with the vague label) is universal, since we cannot abide a meaningless, arbitrary, and cruel existence, and so our faith itself necessitates some kind of divine being. At least I think that's the point. The exposition here is totally incoherent, drawing heavily on personal anecdotes and scattered readings whose relevance is rarely clear. Interesting for fans of Richards looking for a better understanding of where he's coming from (in case there are any of you still wondering), but more an exercise in axe-grinding than a defense of principle.

Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?
James Shapiro

Despite its clever title, James Shapiro is in no doubt that Shakespeare (a.k.a. "the man from Stratford") wrote Shakespeare, and that his many rival claimants are scarcely credible pretenders. Focusing on two of the more prominent rivals, Francis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford, Shapiro doesn't engage with the authorship controversy itself so much as try to explain why Baconians and Oxfordians feel the way they do. The result is a history of changing attitudes toward literature, as readers have re-imagined authors and texts in the image of their own lives and times. A fresh, observant approach to what has always been a pretty silly debate.

Basement Suite
Susan Farrell

The classic he-said/she-said story gets a dark turn as Liz and Eddy, a pair of overeducated and underemployed young people from the Maritimes renting a basement apartment in Vancouver (what were they thinking?), take turns responding to a relationship survey in this disarmingly frank new novel from Cape Breton native Susan Farrell. The form, which has Liz and Eddy addressing their notes from the underground into a recording device, is emblematic of the doomed couple's failure to communicate directly with each other. This is, in turn, a defense mechanism since there are many things they don't want to know. Bleak and contemporary, realistic and experimental, Farrell's debut is confident enough to try something different, and skilful enough to make most of it work.

The Thirty Years War
C. V. Wedgwood

Summarizing the long, chaotic, and ultimately pointless struggle that ravaged various German states from 1618 to 1648 is an impressive enough achievement, but to do it before the age of 30 is nothing short of remarkable. The only reservation I had reading Wedgwood's tour de force was with regard to her dismissal of the long-term effects of the calamity. The "facts" in every case don't tell the whole story. Historical events have the ability to shape national psychologies out of all proportion to their reality (one has only to think of the English "conquest" of the French in this country as an example). That this happened to Germany, as the result of what was by any measure a great human catastrophe, seems pretty clear in retrospect. This doesn't excuse later developments that Wedgwood was writing in the shadow of, but does go some way toward explaining them.

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ
Philip Pullman

In this latest installment in the Myths Series, acclaimed children's author Philip Pullman revisits the life of Jesus of Nazareth. In the Gospel according to Pullman, twin sons are born of Mary: Jesus and Christ. Jesus is the familiar hero, with Christ being the maker of his myth, infusing the bare historical record with a higher truth while being aided and abetted in his task by a sinister stranger patterned after Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor. Pullman's ultimate point only has to do with the human need to find comfort in stories, but this isn't a particularly new approach to understanding Christianity.

Solaris
Stanislaw Lem

In an age of digital literature there's something comforting about an SF novel (albeit from 1961) that imagines a future awash in "an ocean of printed paper" and "seas of ink." These are, in turn, metaphors for the liquid planet of Solaris itself, which is likened to "a library where all the books are written in an indecipherable language." Apparently Lem was upset at Tarkovsky's translating his tale of the impossibility of understanding a truly alien form of life into a romantic space opera, but I think the extension of his ideas logical and the beauty of the film speaks for itself. In comparison the novel seems overly intellectual at times, though still deserving of its reputation as a masterpiece.

Shades of Grey
Jasper Fforde

British author Jasper Fforde, best known for his Thursday Next and Nursery Crimes mystery series, is one of those writers with an imagination so lush and free-wheeling it has to create a whole new universe to play in. Shades of Grey is the first of a projected trilogy set in an eccentric future world (after the "Something That Happened") dominated by rigid social orders that are based on the ability to distinguish between different colours. In this inaugural adventure Eddie Russett is sent to do a chair census in the hick town of East Carmine, where he runs afoul of the local Colortocracy, falls in love with a not-so-plain Jane Grey, and begins to discover some of the terrible secrets of Chromatacia. Light entertainment that feels a bit rushed at the end, but still a lot of fun.

1848: Year of Revolution
Mike Rapport

The word "revolution" suggests not just a turning upside-down but a cycle, and in the case of the revolutions that swept Europe in 1848 that seems particularly apt. Mike Rapport suggests the same connection himself (though he doesn't make it explicit) in his association of the different phases of the revolutions with the seasons - from the springtime of peoples, through the "Red" summer and counter-revolutionary autumn, to the Indian summer of 1849. After the barricades had all come down and the smoke had cleared, Europe failed to change course and in many cases found itself moving backward. The narrative gets a bit sticky with details in this overview, but Rapport does a good job summarizing the different revolutionary theatres and drawing fair and appropriate (though depressing) conclusions. 

Power Man and Iron Fist, Volume 1
Various authors and artists

Marvel Comics' odd coupling of the streetwise Luke Cage/Power Man (he of the silk shirts, skin of steel and "three hundred pounds a' solid muscle") and martial arts master Danny Rand/Iron Fist (so named because of a punch that can be made "like unto a thing of iron") gets the essential anthology treatment in this omnibus edition. I was a fan of this series as a kid, and I think I enjoyed them just as much this time around. Cage isn't a jive-talkin' stereotype, and the romance between Rand and Misty Knight is respectably handled. Of course Misty and Colleen, whose Nightwing Restorations is the distaff version of Heroes for Hire, are still damsels in distress most of the time, with the cash-strapped boys having to take taxis to their rescue. All good fun, and especially nice to see some of the C-list supervillains who don't even have entries in the Marvel Encylopedia make appearances. Whatever happened to The Incinerator? He had potential!

A Short History of Nearly Everything
Bill Bryson

In a book full of numbers, most of them either very big or very small, one that stuck out at me was that the distance from the surface to the center of the Earth is roughly 4,000 miles, but the deepest mines in the world only go down about two miles (with most only descending a quarter of a mile). "If the planet were an apple," Bill Bryson writes, "we wouldn't yet have broken through the skin." So much of inner and outer space is an undiscovered country. And so this is really a Short History of Things We Don't Know. Which is, still, pretty much everything.

The Essential James Reaney
Selected by Brian Bartlett

The latest in what has thus far been an exceptional series of Essential Poets published by Porcupine's Quill (I reviewed a 
few earlier volumes here) distils the long and prolific poetic career of James Reaney down to a manageable 60-page selection. Condensing so many years into so short a space has a kind of time-lapse photography effect, allowing the reader to watch Reaney's poetry develop from the precocious, and sometimes a bit heavy, self-consciousness of The Red Heart to the more free-wheeling experimentation and jokiness of his later years, while observing throughout an energetic imaginative consistency. The doodles that are included don't really add anything, indeed I think they probably subtract from the overall effect, but this is still a worthy addition to an essential collection. 

Under the Dome
Stephen King

It seems daft to call a 1000-plus page brick like Under the Dome a straw, but metaphorically it was the one that broke this camel's back. Every novelist repeats himself, and despite the interesting political subtext - the town as allegory of America under Bush/Cheney - there just isn't enough that's new here to make such a a long haul worthwhile. King's more expansive (in scope, not page count) novels tend to be his weakest; a large canvas takes him away from the intensively developed, claustrophobic domestic horrors that are his greatest strength. His sentimental side is also becoming more pronounced, with the townspeople of Chester's Mill (and their "dogs of note") presented as caricatures of heroism and villainy. And finally the dome itself is as transparent a plot device as it is a physical barrier, resolved in a gratuitous gesture of cosmic sympathy for the human condition. All of which is reassuring, but I think I will be sticking with the Master's more unsettling work, mainly written in the 1980s, from now on. 

The Haunting of Hill House
Shirley Jackson

Just where is Hill House, anyway? Unless the town names mentioned in the early chapters, places like Hillsdale and Ashton, have some specific meaning, I don't think Jackson ever says. And when do the events described take place? Presumably sometime in the 1950s (the book was published in 1959), but the house itself is a Victorian mummy. Dissociated from time and place like this the story takes on an archetypal quality, buttressed with heavy dollops of pop psychology that have not dated quite as well. The compression/echo chamber effect of the prose is carefully crafted to conceal as much as it reveals, and it's all pretty obvious in its mechanics, but then so is its famous forebear The Turn of the Screw. Both are still works to be studied and enjoyed.

Censored 2010
Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff with Project Censored

The notion of what it means to be censored is one of the points addressed in this latest installment of the long-running 
Censored series (I read these every year, and previously reviewed the 2003 and 2009 editions). The media " censors" the news as much through spin, propaganda, and misleading the public into a "hyperreality of knowinglessness" (ugh!) as by killing controversial stories. Along with the countdown of the Top 25 Censored Stories of 2008-09 (top spot went to the rather ho-hum "U.S. Congress Sells Out to Wall Street"), there are also the regular features on previous story follow-ups, junk food news and news abuse, the fear and favour report, and a grab-bag of other, less relevant items. What the final piece, on recent lesbian and gay films, is doing in here is anybody's guess. It's that kind of book

A Distant Mirror
Barbara Tuchman

Oh, the pleasures of re-reading. And the sadness that comes with the realization of how much has been forgotten! I thought I had forgotten all of this book but for a single sentence since first reading it over twenty years ago. As it turned out, I even had the sentence wrong - vindicating Pierre Bayard, I suppose. In any event, the grand historical narrative of Tuchman's trip through "the calamitous fourteenth century" is still compelling, though using the life of Enguerrand de Coucy VII as a vehicle for the story now strikes me as having been a mistake. The "mirror" angle is also left largely unaddressed, which is surprising given the direction Tuchman's thoughts were tending (her next major book would be The March of Folly). But perhaps we just expect more in the way of this today, as we live through our own version of the end times.

The Infinities
John Banville

John Banville writes like a dream, composing some of the most elegant and, yes, intelligent sentences going. In this outing he keeps the fine-tuning just this side of preciosity while describing a day in the house - or is it the mind? - of a dying mathematician. Parallel worlds and alternate realities collide as some playful Greek gods join in, juxtaposing the magical and eternal with the quotidian, sensual reality that Banville so lovingly evokes in all of its texture, taste, and smell. What it means is very much left up for grabs, but with such luscious language one scarcely notices missing the point.

Shocking True Story
Henry E. Scott

The quick rise and nearly as fast fall of Confidential, "the most scandalous scandal magazine in the history of the world," gets told in this pop-history snapshot of the naughty 1950s. Primarily concerned with digging up dirt on adulterers, homosexuals, interracial couples, and communists, Confidential finally flamed out in a flurry of lawsuits and industry backlash. Author Scott tells the stories behind "the stories behind the stories" in chapters that track famous Confidential headlines, while intercutting a biographical sketch of its publisher Robert Harrison. Knowing that the line between fact and fiction, news and entertainment, is vague at best in Hollywood ("this make believe town, where phonies sell baloney by the yard and adjectives grow like palm trees"), Harrison made a fortune working the game, and providing an example for countless imitators, before management showed him the door. 

Mrs. McGinty's Dead
Agatha Christie

It is 1952 and "the great, the unique Hercule Poirot" is "a very old man." He is, however, still up for the intellectual challenge provided by yet another murder in a quaint English village. The later Christie can be pretty grim, but this is actually one of her better efforts, with a bit of light (if condescending) social comedy, and a plot that hits such familiar notes as the conservative emphasis on heredity and breeding, the importance of the historical backstory, and the "pre-eminently theatrical murder" itself. I kicked myself for missing the reader's main clue (which was dreadfully obvious, in retrospect), but found the bit of evidence that tipped Poirot off more than a little obscure. In fact, I'm not sure it even made sense. Still, this ranks as another fine entertainment for killing off the better part of a cold, rainy day.

The Tudors: The Complete Story of England's Most Notorious Dynasty
G. J. Meyer

The Tudors, long-reigning drama queens and kings of English history, heroes of stage, page and screen (big and small), sit for an unflattering family portrait in this lively general history. The emphasis is, predictably, on Henry VIII and Elizabeth I - founding father Henry VII gets short shrift indeed - and the series of religious reformations the period was wracked by. Though not wildly revisionist, Meyer does have a bit of an axe to grind. His judgment of the Tudor dynasty is harshly critical, seeing Henry and Elizabeth in particular as cruel, intolerant, selfish monsters who generally made life miserable for their subjects. Even "Bloody" Mary gets off lightly in comparison.

How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read
Pierre Bayard

Not reading classic works of literature is a matter of special concern for the French, as it has a very specific meaning: Whether or not you've read all of Proust. Pierre Bayard, a professor of French literature who has only skimmed Proust, takes this anxiety (he is also a psychoanalyst) and seeks to assuage it by asserting that not reading is not only inevitable, but a form of creative activity in its own right. By turns tongue-in-cheek, provocative, liberating, and depressing, the thesis of Bayard's little book (which I did read all of, by the way) finally dissolves in light of how much reading one has to do to qualify as truly unread. That so little remains with us, "no more than a few fragments afloat, like so many islands on an ocean of oblivion," was, consciously, one of the reasons I had for starting this site.

Nikolski
Nicolas Dickner

The conceit of a novel constructed out of seemingly unrelated parts that in some metaphysical way connect is now a familiar one, in tune with a cultural zeitgeist that includes David Mitchell's Ghostwritten (Mitchell provides a blurb for Nikolski), the movie Babel, most conspiracy theories, and even the pop bromide about everything happening for a reason. Nikolski is a work informed by this same spirit, tracking the lives of three modern nomads who all relocate to Montreal for a while and whose paths cross without really touching. A very clever, fresh, and lean entertainment buoyed by some terrific writing (ably translated by Lazer Lederhendler). 

Vienna, 1814: How the Conquerors of Napoleon Made Love, War, and Peace at the Congress of Vienna
David King

In 1814, after what seemed to be the end of the Napoleonic Wars, all of Europe went to Vienna to party. The occasion was a peace conference, the Congress of Vienna, where royalty and diplomats came together to draw a new political map of Europe. As David King's subtitle indicates, his emphasis is as much on the Congress's extravagant social scene, the intrigues in the ballrooms and bedrooms, as on the actual diplomacy. But the two were closely connected. The "greatest and most lavish party in history" was eventually crashed by Napoleon's escape from Elba, but after nine months a lasting peace had been brought forth. A better record than Paris, 1919, and almost as interesting as MacMillan's book (which was reviewed here).

This Land Is Their Land
Barbara Ehrenreich

While I'm a fan of Barbara Ehrenreich's adventures in immersive journalism (Nickel and Dimed, Bait and Switch), this collection of short op-ed pieces did not impress. The book's theme, that America is a country divided by class, with all of the meanness, exploitation, and hypocrisy that entails, is a simple one that these various field reports don't do enough to flesh out. Only a few of Ehrenreich's observations combine her rhetorical flair with compelling insight ("we are reaching the point . . . where the largest public housing program in America will be our penitentiary system"), or involve any real newsy reporting (like the way Target handles security problems with its employees). But it's a breezy read and makes an important moral and political statement all the same.

Cultural Amnesia
Clive James

"Notes in the margin of my time," runs the subtitle of this collection of fascinating character sketches and highly quotable marginalia. The "my time," however, is a bit of a stretch, since James (born 1939) is mainly interested in the collapse of the cosmopolitan intellectual culture of pre-First World War Europe (Vienna is the touchstone) and the rise of twentieth-century totalitarianism (Hitler, Stalin, et al.). But while passionately defending individualism against the forces of ideology and closed systems of thought, some of the essays veer into their own judgmental closed-mindedness, a slamming of round pegs into square holes. This is, however, the way cultural memory works. We use it (for our own purposes, of course) or lose it. In the process it is necessarily transformed.

The Death of Conservatism
Sam Tanenhaus

The simple thesis of this short, disposable book (the outgrowth of a magazine article) is that in the cycles of American political thought conservatism is currently on the outs after having become too rigidly ideological. In recent years the classical conservatism of the great tradition has been usurped by the "movement conservatism" of the neocons and subsequently cast into the eclipse by the pragmatic, "compromise" politics of Barack Obama. That Obama is "temperamentally conservative" himself, and his policies - both foreign and domestic - not that clearly distinguishable from those of the preceding Bush administration, suggests the death of liberalism, too. A closely related subject that I think we will be reading more about before too long.

Lord Beaverbrook
David Adams Richards

As part of a series of brief biographies of "Extraordinary Canadians," novelist David Adams Richards tells the story of fellow Miramichi (then Newcastle) native Max Aitken, a kid from the "backward province" of New Brunswick who became the press baron Lord Beaverbrook and, during the Second World War, an important British cabinet minister. Richards feels an obvious kinship, identifying with Aitken's status as the "consummate outsider" and his lifelong struggle against spineless, condescending toffs. But while providing some local insight, filtered through Richards's tirelessly paraded moral and political biases, the book includes no original research and in the end only offers a quick character sketch of its subject.

Favorite Father Brown Stories
G. K. Chesterton

Oh, the insufferable Father Brown! Better the exuberant arrogance of Holmes and Poirot than the cringing, blinking, mock humility of this clerical Uriah Heep, the little village priest with a "face as round and dull as a Norfolk dumpling." Since Chesterton doesn't give the reader sufficient clues to play along, Father Brown comes to seem an agent of God, his over-ballyhooed powers of "reason" a mystical ability to share in the divine mind. There is something almost insulting in the attitude of these stories, a nasty bit of ear-pulling meant to show us not only that we shouldn't look down on the dumpling Brown, but that we should in fact look up to him - while he remains justifiably indifferent to what any of us might think of him or his God-like powers. Pure humbug.

Penny Dreadful
Shannon Stewart

The tabloid world of urban legends and junk science, with roots going back to the penny dreadfuls of the nineteenth century, provides the background for Shannon Stewart's poetic conjuring of real-life bogeyman, pig farmer, and serial killer Robert Pickton. It is Pickton's victims, however, the ghosts of Vancouver's missing women and Jane Does, who are rescued from anonymity to be placed among the stars. An effective concept book that blends high and low, threading together themes of myth and metamorphosis with hysterical headlines and horoscopes, Penny Dreadful is a work in the Modernist mode that does the "news" of the day in different voices. 

The Closing of the Western Mind
Charles Freeman

The bold claim made in this book's title - that the establishment and imposition of official (orthodox) Church doctrine led to the suppression of a great tradition of philosophical inquiry, science, and rational thought - pretty much takes a back seat to a general history of early Christianity. Along the way a sharp eye is cast on such interesting subjects as the politics behind the early ecumenical councils and the Church Fathers' perverse attitude toward sexuality. One of the best introductions available to a subject that Freeman convincingly argues is deserving of more attention.