By
Published: 2005
Category: Beyond Classification [3]
It's so warm out in New York that the birds have been fooled into believing it's Spring. The trees in Central Park are astonishingly green. When I head out to do errands, I'm still wearing shorts and no socks.
But the calendar says November, and that means, in more places than you might imagine, they're stringing holiday lights and getting ready to wind you up to shop.
If I believe the news, it's going to be a fabulous holiday for some of you --- the resorts have all raised their prices and yet they're booked to capacity. For others, it's going to be a season of using Visa cards to pay the heating bill --- and thinking of gifts you can knit or bake.
I'm bad at holidays. I prefer random generosity --- I like to sprinkle gifts throughout the year, popping up with presents when people don't expect anything. But my iconoclasm only goes so far: I am crushed by the pressure to perform in December. And so, gritting my teeth, I do.
I grit my teeth less these last few years, because I do all of my shopping online. Literally: all. The one time I found myself in a store was a mistake, and I corrected it in a few minutes. Noise, perfume, crowds --- not for me. If, like you, I had to find a parking space on top of all that, I'd be babbling now.
What do I give? What I love --- and what I'd love to be getting myself if I had never had the pleasure of these books, CDs and DVDs. And then, because pretty much everything I buy online is discounted, I'm able to make a larger gift to charity. [My cause is hunger --- it makes me crazy how many people, in the richest nation in the history of the planet, go to bed hungry every night. If you share that opinion, please check out Share Our Strength [6] and Second Harvest [7].]
My advice to you: Yes, it's crazy early. But make your list, check it twice --- and get it done now. While everyone else is running around like madmen starting the day after Thanksgiving, you can relax. Indeed, maybe you can even get in the holiday spirit.
BOOKS [8]
Thriller/Suspense: The Tears of Autumn [9] by Charles McCarry. Who killed John F. Kennedy Jr.? McCarry, a former CIA agent, has created in Paul Christopher a spy worthy of John Le Carre. Paul doesn't carry a gun. He won't betray an agent. He won't help a regime that tortures political prisoners. For a guy who's physically fit and courageous in the usual manly ways, he's astonishingly thoughtful. And he's not unique; in his branch of the CIA, there's a real commitment to The Code....
Mystery: The Killer Inside Me [10] by Jim Thompson. Stanley Kubrick, the film director who knew a thing or three about evil, said 'The Killer Inside Me' was "probably the most chilling and believable first-person story of a criminally warped mind I have ever encountered." Consider yourself warned.
Historical Fiction: Dark Voyage [11] by Alan Furst. His novels are set in Europe in the years before (and, sometimes, during) World War II, and their ostensible topic is espionage, and the occasional gun does go off, but these are most definitely not 'guy' books --- indeed, men looking for testosterone-powered thrillers of the Tom Clancy school will be bitterly disappointed by Furst. Because he is, first and foremost, a novelist of considerable gifts. He can create intriguing situations. He can also create complex characters, serve up a lovely description, concoct a sophisticated love scene. If you like elegance, Furst's for you.
Fiction: Last Night [12] by James Salter. Many will find this writing overly mannered. Yes, there are crumpled napkins on tables uncleared from last night's dinner party: "glasses still with dark remnant on them, coffee stains, and plates with bits of hardened Brie." Privileged women pine for love -- or sex. At a man's funeral, there are women the widow has never seen before. A married man is having an affair with a male friend. A hill is made from a pile of junked cars. A romantic opportunity is missed. The sentences drop, regular as coins. Salter's cadences are so hypnotic it's easy to miss them. But they are arrows to the real subject of these stories, which are, like the best stories about adult men and women, about honor and love in the face of death.
Women's Fiction: The Quality of Life Report [13] by Meghan Daum. Lucinda Trout is a junior TV producer in New York City. She has a degree in l9th century American literature from Smith; by now, she thinks, she should be working for NPR or PBS. Instead, she does reports of takeout sushi and what it's like to wear a thong all day (or, "can you learn to live with a permanent wedgie?). In her off-hours, she wonders what happened to yogurt ("It just went away") and the disappearance of gold jewelry. Then she gets an assignment to investigate crystal meth --- "coke for the Payless shoes set" --- in the Heartland. She flies out to "Prairie City."Most of the women are...super-sized. They wear Birks and harem pants. They give "menopause showers" for middle-aged friends. Restaurant food tastes "like lunch at a school cafeteria." And yet there's something appealing about Big Sky country. A good apartment is $475 a month. On a lark, she arranges to do a year of reporting --- "The Quality of Life Report" --- for her New York show on what life is like in Alien America. And off she moves to Prairie City....
Foreign Fiction: Bel-Ami [14]by Guy de Maupassant. George --- the kind of handsome guy from the country who, for lack of a better thing to do, joins the Army --- finishes his military service without a prospect in the world. He moves to the big city, because that's where opportunity lies. But he gets a lousy job and is totally frustrated. One evening he runs into Charles, an old Army buddy who's now a newspaper editor. Charles has an idea: George should write up his wartime experiences, Charles will publish them, and then George will have some business and social credibility. One problem: George can't write. No problem: Charles's wife will help him. She does. A job follows. And social invitations. And rich lovers. And thus begins George's rise to the top in Paris in 1885.
For Naturalists: The Rarest of the Rare: Stories Behind the Treasures at the Harvard Museum of Natural History [15] by Nancy Pick. Consider this book a call to dream of exotic places, fascinating expeditions and late-night conversations around crackling fires with men and women who make Indiana Jones sound dull. The irony: Everything featured here is in the museum at Harvard that's easiest to overlook. If you know anything about it, it's because you've heard of its collection of glass flowers. But as this book attests, there's much, more to savor in its collection of 21 million specimens. (The "Egg Room" alone has 30,000 boxes of birds' nest and eggs --- no wonder an early part of the museum was called The Repository of Curiosities.)
Non-Fiction/Adventure: We Die Alone [16] by David Howarth. It is 1943. The Germans have overrun Norway. But there is a vigorous Norwegian Resistance; in London, an ambitious plan has a dozen tough Norwegians cruising home on what looks like a fishing boat and blowing up a Nazi airfield. As the boat chugs into the harbor of a tiny Norwegian town, the plan is discovered and the boat is blown out of the water. One man swims to safety: Jan Baalsrud. Now he has a fresh challenge --- get out of Norway. He has no supplies. It's deadly cold. Does he fall 300 feet in an avalanche? Is he frostbitten? Is he snowbound? Does he spend a week in a hut with almost no food? Does he ---- with a knife that's far from a surgical instrument --- amputate most of his toes? All of that, and more, and still he keeps his wits and his will.
Eccentric coffee table: Dora Lives: The Authorized Story of Miki Dora [17] by C.R Stecyk III and Drew Campion. In the mid-'50s, a dark, brooding kid out of Hollywood High became the James Dean of surfing. Maybe the greatest ever to ride the boards at Malibu, Mickey Dora was also the most cutting, enigmatic and mercurial. He hung out with Peter Lawford, was 'surf stuntman' for 'Gidget,' taught Sally Field how to look like she was hanging ten. By the mid-'60s, Dora was sideswiping amateurs who attempted to ride his waves and mocking the commercialization of surfing. He turned to poetry, but his talent veered to writing bad checks; by the '80s, he had pushed a credit-card spree to the point of fraud and prison. He died of cancer in 2002. Now he is the subject of a blunt, ironic ('Miki Dora wasn't perfect, but he had tendencies') picture-and-text biography that is never less than mesmerizing and is destined for the hippest of coffee tables and nightstands.
Jazz: Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond [18] by Doug Ramsey. Desmond's 'Take Five' appears on a 1959 Dave Brubeck album called 'Time Out.' The record company hated it. America loved it. The song was a hit. The album was the first jazz release to sell a million copies. Overnight, Brubeck was famous, and he and Desmond were --- at least by musician standards --- insanely rich. 'Beauty, simplicity, originality, discrimination and sincerity" --- that was what Desmond sought from music. And it's what he provided. His tone was cool and hollow, discrete as a priest in the confessional. He described it best: 'I want to sound like a dry martini.' He lived hard, died young --- and makes for great reading.
Spirituality: A Month of Sundays: Searching for the Spirit and My Sister [19] by Julie Mars. Shirley Kress Carter, born in 1937 died as Christmas ended in 2000. Shirley was a mother of six, a professional caregiver, a resident of that northernmost patch of Vermont that qualifies almost every resident to call herself a hermit. Women like this often pass through the world unnoticed. It is not surprising, therefore, that one of her sisters, bowed by grief, would attempt to lift her up --- to pump importance into her life --- in a memoir that celebrates the holiness of an unheralded existence. But what Julie Mars has done is present us with a spiritual challenge wrapped in a story...
Society: Everybody Was So Young [20]by Amanda Vaill. Late each morning in the summer of 1922, Gerald Murphy went outside his home in Antibes and created something never seen before --- a beach! --- by raking the seaweed and stones. For this, he is said to have invented the idea of the Riviera as a summer destination. Moments later, his wife Sara would join him. She wore a white linen dress or bathing suit. And, always, a long strand of pearls, which she looped around her back so she wouldn't mar her tan (and, she said, because the sun was good for them). For this, she became a style-setter and muse. Gerald and Sara together were not two but one. They were "The Murphys," a young and rich American couple who used their youth and money to establish themselves at the center of a cultural elite in which everybody was young, talented, acclaimed. Cole Porter, Stravinsky, Picasso (who was in love with Sara), Cocteau --- though they were stars on their own, they orbited the Murphys. They make a compelling story: glorious, beautiful, tragic.
Self Help: The Creative Habit [21]by Twyla Tharp. Mozart became a