Summer books: more than just beach reading

There’s a tendency among book readers and book critics alike to use the phrases “summer reading” and “beach reading” somewhat interchangeably, as if the only books published between the months of May and August were penned by the likes of James Patterson (who does, incidentally, have a new novel, Sail, coming out in June).

Neglected in this equation are the other books published during that time: good books, bad books and mediocre books. Rather than let these thousands of pages go unread for another summer, The Temple News has decided to provide you with a brief, categorical guide to what publishing executives and the rest of the American literary scene have determined will be cool this summer:

BRITISH AUTHORS
Historically, we have got a lot to be grateful to Britain for: representative government, the Beatles, not totally hanging us out to dry on the whole Iraq thing, and a lot of books that will be hitting American bookshelves over the next few months.

Apples, the London-lauded debut novel from 21-year-old Richard Milward, is billed as something like an On the Road for the MySpace generation. Or if you’re into the whole James Patterson deal, why not try Britain’s best-selling crime author, Martina Cole, making her American debut this July with Close? My personal choice, however, would have to be Adam Thirlwell’s highly anticipated and pretty much self-explanatory The Delighted States: A Book of Novels, Romances & Their Unknown Translators, Containing Ten Languages, Set On Four Continents, & Accompanied by Maps, Portraits, Squiggles, Illustrations & a Variety of Helpful Indexes.

POLITICS
The 2008 Democratic National Convention isn’t going down until late August, so theoretically we could spend an entire summer hooked on the Obama-Clinton question.

If 24-hour press coverage of their campaigns, eventually to be succeeded by even more extensive coverage in advance of the general election, isn’t enough politics for you, then find some time to work Ted Widmer’s thoughtful Ark of the Liberties: America and the World into your reading schedule. Or, if thoughtful’s not your bag, try one of the political thrillers by Mike Lawson or Ralph Reed that’ll be hitting stores this June. Liberals might enjoy John R. Talbot’s Obamanomics: How Bottom-Up Economic Prosperity Will Replace Trickle-Down Economics. Ultra-leftist radicals would probably be more taken by Jim Marrs’ The Rise of the Fourth Reich: The Secret Societies That Threaten To Take Over America.

THE INTERNET
There are few things hipper or trendier right now than localism, sustainability and the Internet. If you’re interested in the first, just keep reading and we’ll do you well; the second, try Thomas L. Friedman’s latest, Green is the New Red, White and Blue, due out this August. And the Internet? Well, online publishing isn’t quite so revolutionary as those guys who write Battlestar Gallactica fan fiction would have you think, but it certainly has shaken things up a bit.

Now, you’ve even got fairly established authors like Mike Heppner doing the Radiohead thing and releasing their latest work online.

The world of online publishing is far too large to even begin to be encapsulated here, but it’s worth taking a look into this summer, particularly if you’re planning on working a desk job. Enrich your mind instead of spending six hours a day on Facebook.

LOCALISM
Almost as cool as the Internet. Unless you’re not into that, in which case it’s about a thousand times cooler.

Yes, localism is quite hip right now as well—so why not extend your produce-shopping practices to the literary world? Philadelphia has a wealth of local independent and university-affiliated presses worth checking out this summer. Penn, Arcadia, St. Joe’s and, of course, Temple all offer a fairly interesting publishing calendar. The award-winning Running Press features a good, general selection, covering a wide range of interests. Polyglot Press is a bit more literary, republishing rare or out-of-print works.

If you’re looking for Indie street cred, take senior English major and literary aficionado Emilie Haertsch’s advice and check out Ixnay Press. Interested in supporting a local author without overstraining your mind? Try D.H. Dublin’s Freezer Burn, a CSI-esque thriller featuring some of Philly’s finest.

NON-FICTION
It might just be me, but summer publishing always seems to be dominated by totally unbelievable thrillers and a veritable cornucopia of non-fiction books. This summer is no exception, and the “recently released non-fiction” shelves are sure to be packed come August as the “half-price nonfiction” bin is come mid-September.

Non-fiction readers can choose from Tony Perrottet’s Napoleon’s Privates, a collection of bawdy historical anecdotes; debut memoirist Adam Nimoy’s My Incredibly Wonderful, Miserable Life: An Anti-Memoir; the timely Rome, 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World by David Maraniss; Me of Little Faith, comedian Lewis Black’s entry into the field of religion; and Douglas Preston’s The Monster of Florence, a narrative history in the tradition of all those other narrative histories that have been coming out lately.

Providing a list like this means ruling out a lot of books that can’t find their way into any of those categories – including one I’m particularly looking forward to Love Today, the first English-language collection from German literary jack-of-all-trades Maxim Billar. In the end, few things beat a good book, glass of wine and cool breeze on a midsummer’s evening; so whatever your tastes, something will be released this summer that caters to them.

Try looking beyond the New York Times Best Sellers List, and you’ll discover a wealth of worthwhile summer reading you might otherwise have overlooked.

Peter Chomko can be reached at pchomko@temple.edu.

Vonnegut offers one last gasp of literary genius

Just more than one year ago, America lost one of its finest writers – one of the world’s finest writers – of the 20th century.
Kurt Vonnegut’s death on April 11, 2007 did not exactly come as a shock – he was, after all, 84 years old. For many of Vonnegut’s readers, however, facing a world in which this extremely prolific writer’s prose is no  longer featured regularly still seemed a rather dire fate.

Such readers can now take heart, as the one-year a nniversary of Vonnegut’s death was marked by the publication of Armageddon in Retrospect, a posthumous collection of Vonnegut’s previously unpublished work on the topic of war. While the book – as many posthumous collections are – is a bit varied in quality, it remains a must-read for Vonnegut aficionados interested in better understanding his growth and development as a writer.

Armageddon in Retrospect, like many of Vonnegut’s collections, is a smattering of different things. Speeches, essays, letters, fiction, an introduction by the author’s son and color plates of the elder Vonnegut’s artwork fill this relatively slim volume’s 200-odd pages.

No chronology of any sort is provided, but most of the nonfiction and art collected in Armageddon seem a bit more recent than the fiction. Many of the short stories appear to be extremely rough drafts and false starts to Slaughterhouse-Five, the 1968 novel that would catapult Vonnegut to literary fame.

Dealing with Vonnegut’s experience as a prisoner of war during the Allied firebombing of Dresden, Germany, during World War II, these stories show traces of the experimentation that would eventually yield the revolutionary Slaughterhouse-Five. Although none of these stories pack either the literary or emotional punch of that novel, they do offer readers the chance to experience the gradual evolution of Vonnegut’s approach to the topic, and make Armageddon a fitting companion piece to the more mature Slaughterhouse.

Although Vonnegut’s early fiction reveals an author struggling to find his voice, all the elements that would later make that voice so identifiable – the wry wit, the humanist tone, the great facility with still-accessible language – are present in this collection. Indeed, though, these stories may not read quite like Vonnegut, they are at least proto-Vonnegutian, offering glimpses of the master their author would become. And throughout all of Armageddon in Retrospect, from the earliest story to the last speech the author ever composed, runs the note of cynical humor that made Kurt Vonnegut such a fitting spokesperson for our time.

“How should we behave during this Apocalypse?” Vonnegut asks in one speech. “We should be unusually kind to one another, certainly. But we should also stop being so serious. Jokes help a lot.”

Thank you then, Kurt, for 84 years of helping out a lot.

Peter Chomko can be reached at pchomko@temple.edu.

Beneath bigotry, difficult truth lurks

Who would have guessed in 1991 that the post-Cold War era would last only a decade? That, just less than 10 years later, an even more momentous event than the collapse of the Soviet Union would come to shape the lives of our generation? The enormity of Sept. 11, 2001, is now almost utterly uncontested – for better or for worse, the events of that morning changed everything.

The past six years or so have seen the number of books published on terrorism, the Middle East, Muslim culture and countless related topics increase exponentially. Add now to their mix The Second Plane: September 11: Terror and Boredom, by the English author Martin Amis. Controversy has never been something for Amis to shy away from, and this collection of essays is no exception. In The Second Plane, Amis tackles life in the post-Sept. 11 world with his fury unchecked – an approach that many have, and will, object to.

There is no denying that The Second Plane is rife with bigotry. There is bigotry, most certainly, and a good amount of it. But there are also truths — uncomfortable truths — that, with difficulty, can be sifted out of the vitriol. Example: “And doesn’t Texas sometimes seem to resemble a country like Saudi Arabia, with its great heat, its oil wealth, its brimming houses of worship and its weekly executions?”

Amis has a talent for arguing by analogy – although not, perhaps, quite such a highly developed talent as he seems to think. The essays in The Second Plane lambast everybody involved in the events leading up to and following the Sept. 11 attacks: Osama bin Laden, George W. Bush, Tony Blair and even Ronald Reagan, whom Amis (in a rhetorical move sure to alienate American conservatives) goes so far as to compare to Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

If there is one thing Amis is not, it is sensitive. If there are two things, then the other is undoubtedly modest. In skewering the entire political spectrum, all world religions, a good part of the artistic and business worlds, and seemingly anybody else he can think of, Amis reveals an almost total disbelief in anything other than his own infallibility. And the worst part is, there are times when you can’t help but to agree with him.

Even if you remain unconvinced by Amis’s arguments – and I, it must be said, was rarely swayed from my own beliefs – The Second Plane is worth reading simply as a penetrating analysis of how the fabric of life itself was changed by the Sept. 11 attacks. And though it is often obscured beneath his divisive, virulent prose, the question that drives Amis belies his good heart.

“What has extremism ever done for anyone?” Amis asks in his author’s note. “Where are its gifts to humanity? Where are its works?”

Peter Chomko may be contacted at pchomko@temple.edu.

Hayes makes equations interesting and inciting

Let me tell you a little something about how the book-criticism business works. I don’t pay for the books I review. Sometimes, publishers send me a copy unsolicited, but most of the time I request a review copy directly from the publisher. There’s no set system for how I choose the books I’m going to review, either. If a new book receives a good deal of attention prior to its release, if it seems like it might hold some particular appeal for college students or Philadelphians, if its author is somebody significant – then I make a request.

Such requests account for about half of the books I review – the others are chosen simply because something about them seemed interesting.

Group Theory in the Bedroom, and Other Mathematical Diversions, a new collection from essayist Brian Hayes, falls squarely into the latter category. I didn’t have any idea who Hayes was when I requested his book, I didn’t have any idea what it would be about, and I didn’t have any idea of what sort of person it might appeal to. All I knew was that Group Theory sounded like a pretty lurid title for a collection of essays about math. Titles, actually, are one thing Hayes does particularly well – one of many things he does well, really.

I’ve now read Group Theory, and can assure you that there is nothing lurid whatsoever about the title essay, that there is nothing particularly lurid, indeed, about the whole book. But I can also assure you that it is quite worth reading. But I can tell this is not going to be an easy sell.

Think for a second about Freakonomics, the unlikely bestseller by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt. Dubner and Levitt’s book doesn’t exactly sound like the sequel to The Da Vinci Code. It pretty much consists of essays in which the principles of microeconomics are applied to situations beyond the range of normal economic analyses. It sounds, in short, pretty boring – yet I have no doubt that if you haven’t read Freakonomics yet, there’s an excellent chance that you know somebody who has. The book, despite all odds, has seemingly been read by everybody.

So think about Group Theory as a more challenging – but as a result, more rewarding – book in the style of Freakonomics (unless you’re a math major, in which case my telling you that it is quite simply the best collection of essays on complicated mathematics that I’ve ever read might just be enough to get you hooked right off the bat). Hayes considers a myriad of extremely interesting topics (What would our world be like without randomness? Can an algorithm explain the causes of war? How do scientists think? And just how should one go about rotating one’s mattress?), and does it in a writing style that even I, with very little mathematical training, found engaging and accessible.

Hayes is that rare combination: a man comfortable in both the scientific world of mathematics and the uncertain terrain of language. His facility with numbers is equaled – possibly even excelled – only by his talent for thinking and writing about interesting ideas in interesting ways. Unlike Freakonomics, Group Theory focuses more on the process of discovery than its conclusion, allowing Hayes to meditate at length on the idea of math and science as exploration.

Group Theory in the Bedroom is not for everybody, and I am well aware that no amount of argument on my part will convince some readers to pick up a collection of essays about math. But for any others who may have been even slightly swayed by my opinion, I strongly encourage giving Brian Hayes a chance – rarely is one given the opportunity to enjoy learning quite so much as when reading his work.

Peter Chomko can be reached at pchomko@temple.edu.

Postmodern literature with heart and humor

 Authors, like members of any other profession, have their own quirks and specialties. For instance, Dickens was particularly good at crafting memorable characters, while Hemingway is worth reading for the sound and rhythm of his prose style alone. Other writers specialize in particularly intricate plots, forceful ironies, or countless other literary foci. Steven Millhauser does ideas.

With Dangerous Laughter, the latest collection of short stories from the Pulitzer Prize-winning Millhauser, the idea-driven story is elevated to heights not reached since Ray Bradbury was in his short story-writing prime several decades ago. And not only are Millhauser’s ideas excellent – the stories he writes around them sparkle with wit and captivate the reader with their stylish, graceful prose.

Dangerous Laughter is organized into four sections: “Opening Cartoon” (a rather charming existentialist take on Tom & Jerry), “Vanishing Acts” (tales of loss and disappearance), “Impossible Architectures” (chronicling folly, excess and the pursuit of impossible dreams), and “Heretical Histories” (Millhauser’s mind let loose on the alternate-history genre).
Tying all the sections and all the stories together is a sense of hubris. Millhauser’s characters are discontent in letting well enough alone; they are constantly striving to see over the next hill, to find greener grasses, to challenge those that would say “enough is enough” – consequences be damned.

It is in the description of these consequences that Millhauser truly lets his imagination run wild. His stories are filled with the riches of metaphors and a highly-developed sense of philosophical humor. Millhauser is a thinking man’s comedian, and the laughter his stories elicit is rightly called dangerous. With tongue firmly in cheek, Millhauser does for contemporary American society what only the best of satirists can: makes us simultaneously cringe with horror and laugh out loud at the follies and foibles we find surrounding us every day.

“Books weren’t made of themes, which you could write essays about,” Millhauser writes in “The Room in the Attic,” “But of images that inserted themselves into your brain and replaced what you were seeing with your eyes.”

Dangerous Laughter is certainly one such book. In rendering the familiar in fantastical, highly imaginative terms, Millhauser replaces our everyday perceptions – inured as they are to the very grossness of the culture we inhabit – with entirely new visions that, paradoxically, render our perceptions of the real world all the more real.
Later in the same story, Millhauser divides people into two categories: wakers and dreamers.

“Wakers had once had the ability to dream, but had lost it,” writes Millhauser.

Today, all too many of us have become wakers, stumbling through life with our imaginations kept tied up on a short leash. In Dangerous Laughter, Millhauser encourages readers to follow his lead in exercising their imaginations to the full extent possible – and have fun doing so.

Peter Chomko can be reached at pchomko@temple.edu.

Come on, Bill: a review of Bill Cosby’s “Come on People”

It was around 2004 and the 50th anniversary of the Brown versus Board of Education Supreme Court decision that Bill Cosby began his transformation from legendary entertainer to third rail.

“People marched and were hit in the face with rocks to get an education, and now we’ve got these knuckleheads,” he said addressing an audience in Washington back in the summer of 2005. “The lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal. These people are not parenting.”

He has taken an active role in criticizing the shortcomings of black American culture, in the parenting, lifestyles and priorities. For it, he has gotten the Huxtable beaten out of him from black leaders, progressive whites, race commentators and activists of every other size, agenda and caliber.

He has tried to develop dialogue, through his discussions and speeches, even his Web site.

The thing is, news about Bill Cosby, who first went to Temple in the 1960s before leaving to pursue his comedy career, is intensely important to any Temple student worth the Hooter in their heart. And, you gotta at least respect someone for thinking an issue so important that he bets his career, his reputation is worth risking. The Cos has done both, news and risk, again.

Last month, Cosby and his longtime collaborator Dr. Alvin Poussaint, a Harvard professor of psychiatry, put out their latest attempt at enacting change, this a book from the world’s largest Christian publisher, Thomas Nelson, called “Come on People.”

The book is full of the things he has been saying in interviews and town hall meetings, at conferences and during speeches. Unabashed criticism for a sometimes undefined segment of the black population.

“…Black English in school and on the job gets the user nowhere,” Cosby and Poussaint wrote wrote.

For criticizing black slang, in addition to hip-hop music, materialism and other plagues they see in black culture, Cosby has been derided as a sell-out, his very authenticity as a black man questioned, despite his North Philadelphia upbringing, his seminal place as a black entertainer, and the reality of the place he seems to direct his words: the black community, not mainstream whites, as some have criticized his tenets most serve.

“When African Americans are committed to something, they make it happen,” he and Poussaint wrote. “The civil rights bills did not pass just because white people decided it was an idea whose time had come. We made it happen.”

“We all have some piece of Frederick Douglass in us… a slave wanting to read…” they continued.

Still, the criticism comes.

“While I don’t question his love for black people, his recent actions have appeared more venomous than valuable,” wrote Marc Lamont Hill, a professor of education at Temple, in the Baltimore Sun last month. “More condescending than caring and more hateful than helpful.”

At times, ‘Come on People‘ reads like an instruction manual – including things like advice about getting finances in order – but it is tough to believe those they hope to convince are going to read it. Community meetings might be a better forum, and I would be surprised if the Cos and his Harvard M.D. buddy didn’t realize. I suspect ‘Come on People’ is a way for him to promote his message, to get gigs on “Meet the Press,” as he did Oct. 14, and “Larry King Live” and other talk shows, as he has.

When this movement of his began back in 2004, Cosby told CNN that, “this is about little children, and people not giving them better choices.”

I can believe it. And, like most who aren’t living in the Richard Allen projects or Norris Homes, I agree. But what might matter most is the progress Cosby is making, which, sadly, appears to be not much. He hasn’t brought on enough high-profile black Americans to his side. Perhaps for the same reason his mission hasn’t caused much more than criticism. His influence may be waning, inching one of the most important, most iconic, most impersonated entertainers from the 20th century towards irrelevance.

Christopher Wink can be reached at cwink@temple.edu.