Little Bee: A Novel of London, Nigeria, and Immigration

Little Bee: A Novel

Much as we may try to contain our tidy borders, the larger world seeps in.

That is the message of Little Bee,the second novel by Guardian columnist Chris Cleave. Little Beerecalls the on-the-run scenes and raw violence of Ishmael Beah’s memoir, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. It also recalls the illegal immigrant’s random capture in the film “The Visitor.” But finally, it is its own piece of art, a fiction employing alternating first-person narratives and treating themes of selfishness, greed and generosity.

Cleave’s first novel was, like this one, fueled by politics. About a terrorist bombing in London, Incendiarywon the 2006 Somerset Maugham Award and, in the U.S., the Book-of-the-Month Club’s First Fiction Award.

Cleave writes with a journalist’s eye for the cutting and loaded detail and a novelist’s larger sympathies.

The new novel begins with the refugee called Little Bee,who speaks the Queen’s proper English, rounded by the musical and rhythmic influence of her native Nigeria. The chapters belonging to her read with the depth and wisdom of proverbs.

Little Beehas been stuck for two years in the Black Hill Immigration Removal Center in Essex, outside of London. The novel opens on the day of her release, a chance consequence of a bureaucrat’s trade for sexual favors with another detainee.

Little Beeis a refugee because she and her older sister witnessed the burning of her Nigerian village by men in the employ of shadowy players in an oil war.

Read more of Jeffery Ann Goudie's review here, or get a copy now!

What Everyone Needs To Know About Anesthesia: New Book Explains Facts

Before the Scalpel: What Everyone Should Know About Anesthesia

Before the Scalpel: What Everyone Should Know About Anesthesia, Dr. Dhar walks readers through the various steps that ensure a safe and pain-free experience during medical procedures that may require or benefit from anesthesia. Before the Scalpel is formatted and illustrated for quick and easy reference in an interactive manner. This is a take-along-book to the doctor’s office, with outlines and room to make notations. Each chapter is a mini crash course for any person who is concerned about the anesthesia aspect of surgery.

Before the Scalpel: What Everyone Should Know About Anesthesia, Dr. Dhar explores such real-life topics as:

• Pain-relief options during Labor and Delivery
• Facts to know before deciding on Plastic and Cosmetic Surgery
• Why children are not just “small adults” when it comes to anesthesia
• How obesity adds risk to surgery and anesthesia
• The common fear of awareness during anesthesia

Check out all of the information presented. A must for anyone preparing for surgery or a medical procedure:

• Anesthesia: The art of comfort
• At the helm: The anesthesiologist
• Choices, choices: Tools of the trade
• It’s showtime! What to expect
• The countdown: Diving in
• Clean and serene: The operating room
• Watching over you: Monitors and measures
• The recovery room: Wake up and feel better
• The “ouch” factor: Controlling pain

Special Topics

• Nips and tucks: repair, restore, rejuvenate
• Weighty matters: what about the heavy patient?
• Labor of love: enjoy childbirth
• The smallest breaths: when your child needs anesthesia
• Smile! dentistry and oral surgery
• The “ick” factor: post-operative nausea and vomiting
• Awake? aware? taking care

Author Panchali Dhar, MD, is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Anesthesiology and Anesthesiologist at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center and is board-certified in Internal Medicine and Anesthesiology. She has demystified the process and terms associated with anesthesia and arranged the information in an easy to understand topic-by-topic sourcebook. Dr. Dhar takes you into the complicated, fascinating, cutting-edge world of anesthesia.

Read more about Dr. Panchali Dhar and her new book here, or get a copy now!

For complete tour details, visit http://virtualblogtour.blogspot.com/2009/01/behind-scalpel-by-panchali-dhar-md.html

English Translation of German Novel Sheds Light on Resistance to Nazis

Every Man Dies Alone

THIS NOVEL WAS FIRST PUBLISHED in Germany in 1947, its author dying from an overdose of morphine the same year. It has never previously appeared in English, and I confess to having heard of neither author nor novel, despite the fact that this excellent English translation by Michael Hofmann carries a remarkable endorsement from Primo Levi: "the greatest book ever written about German resistance to the Nazis".

Actually that is a bit misleading. Though two of the main characters, Otto and Anna Quangel, do engage in a campaign of resistance, they do so in isolation. They have no confederates, and their resistance achieves almost nothing. This is no conspiracy by high-ranking German officers for whom the assassination of Hitler was to be the occasion for a coup d'état.

Otto Quangel works as a foreman in a former furniture factory which by the end of the second year of the war is making coffins instead. He once voted for the Nazis – in 1933, I would guess – but his revulsion has been promoted by his awakening sense of the criminal nature of the regime and then by the death of his only son in France in 1940. As for his resistance: every Sunday he laboriously writes a postcard denouncing the war or some aspect of the regime, and the next day either he or his wife leaves the card on the staircase of some office block. It may not seem much, but it demands courage. Almost all the cards are handed in at once by whoever finds them, and the Gestapo launches a search for their author.

Penguin bill the novel as a thriller, but though the narrative is gripping, the true fascination of the book is the picture it offers of working-class Berlin during the war. The Quangels are decent working people, but most of those who live around them are petty criminals, low-lifes, stool-pigeons, informers, drunks, Nazis. One Gestapo inspector has some decent instincts, but nevertheless pursues the case determinedly. Failing to make the progress expected of him, he learns that not even his uniform and rank can protect him in a criminal state.

Read more of Allan Massie's review here, or get a copy now!

Sophie Calle, French Art, and Sex: Gregoire Bouillier's Second Memoir

Report on Myself

To belong to the pantheon of French literary giants is, among other things, to be forever identified with one pithy, unforgettable phrase. René Descartes? “I think, therefore I am.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau? “Man is born free, and he is everywhere in chains.” Gustave Flaubert? “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” Jean-Paul Sartre? “Hell is other people.”

The contemporary French author Grégoire Bouillier is too self-mocking by half to claim membership in this exalted club; his very pretensions to intellectual activity are, in his telling, a source less of honor than of horreur. Witness, for example, his description of an unpleasant cocktail-­party encounter with a writer more celebrated than he: “For a long time I just stood there, feeling like a gob of spit, and now it was settled, no matter what might happen to me here, no good could come of it or make me feel better or calmer. I’d only feel diminished and ugly and vain and artistic and French and refuted, once and for all. Refuted from head to toe.” Hell is other people indeed.

Yet for better or worse, Bouillier can take credit for perhaps the best-known literary quip of his generation, which concluded a “Dear Jane” e-mail message he sent a few years ago to the artist Sophie Calle, then his girlfriend. That phrase, “Take care of yourself,” became the title and the centerpiece of Calle’s exhibition in the 2007 Venice Biennale: a multimedia assemblage of pictures, poems, puzzles and commentary from more than 100 women (not to mention “2 hand puppets / and a parrot,” Calle specified) as to what, exactly, Bouillier’s parting words meant. While they were lovers, Calle’s stardom far exceeded Bouillier’s. But her mercilessly public dissection of their breakup made him — in cultured European circles, at least — a household name in his own right.

As it happens, Bouillier himself isn’t exactly uncomfortable with Calle’s habit of transforming private embarrassment into art. Au contraire, personal humiliations are the subject of his two memoirs, The Mystery Guestand Report on Myself. Published in French in 2004 and in English in 2006, The Mystery Guestdetails the beginnings of his doomed affair with Calle. Report on Myself— which came out in France in 2002, and which has just been released in a fine English translation by Bruce Benderson — chronicles his parents’ erotic peccadilloes, his own amorous obsessions and his perennial inability, in matters of love and sex, to reconcile dreams with reality. The winner of France’s prestigious Prix de Flore, Report on Myselfis a study in raw angst and mortifying self-disclosure: a portrait of the artist as a lover who just can’t catch a break.

Read more of Caroline Weber's review here, or get a copy now!

The Worlds Largest Unsolved Art Theft: New Book Details Story

The Gardner Heist: The True Story of the World's Largest Unsolved Art Theft

Just after midnight on March 18, 1990, two men wearing police uniforms knocked on the door of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, informing the guard on duty that they had received a complaint about a disturbance on the premises.

Once inside, the men — who were not cops — proceeded to rob the museum, taking Rembrandt's "Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee" and Vermeer's "The Concert," among other masterpieces. With an estimated $600 million in property involved, this was by far the largest art theft in modern times.

The identity of the thieves remains a mystery to this day, and the stolen artworks have never been seen again.

In his new book, The Gardner HeistU. S. News & World Report contributing editor Ulrich Boser provides a lively account of both the robbery and the ensuing investigation. He paints a vivid portrait of the high-stakes world of art crime, interviewing FBI agents, private detectives, thieves, fences, middlemen, and a variety of people involved with museums and the art market. Along the way, he fills in the history of Gardner Museum, comments on the artistic importance of the missing pictures, and makes perceptive observations on Boston's sometimes arcane social and cultural politics — all accomplished with admirable succinctness.

To some extent, Boser models his approach on Edward Dolnick's "The Rescue Artist," which documented the investigation into the theft of Edvard Munch's "The Scream" in 1994. Like Dolnick, Boser begins in cinematic style by picturing the Gardner thieves before the robbery, sitting in their car, outside the museum, waiting for the appropriate moment to set their plan into motion.

After narrating the theft, he then introduces art detective Harold Smith (who works for large insurers such as Lloyds of London), much as Dolnick quickly segued to the activities of Scotland Yard undercover officer Charley Hill.

Read the rest of the review by Jonathan Lopez here, or get a copy now!

A Psychologically Productive Life: John Donne The Reformed Soul

John Donne: The Reformed Soul: A Biography

For every man alone thinks he hath got/ To be a phoenix, and that there can be/ None of that kind, of which he is, but he.

—John Donne, An Anatomy of the World: The First Anniversary

Psychologically, it seems (despite all evidence to the contrary) that we live in the Age of Reconciliation. Unity and balance are central to our ideals. Lovers stay together, or split only to rejoin; children spend their lives with therapists who reconcile them to their parents’ mistakes; we try to reconcile our passions with the reality of our day jobs and our illicit desires with our values. This spirit is not new, or all-encompassing. Still, there have been times when individuals were defined by the strained conversation between chasms in conscience and community, art and patron, lusts and prayers; a time when psychic conflict was understood as a potentially productive, rather than destructive, energy. Arguably, no poet—perhaps no person—in the history of Western literature embodies the creative and vital nature of personal contradiction more than John Donne. In John Donne: The Reformed Soul,John Stubbs confidently lays out the biographical details (or, as Donne might say, an anatomy) of his life. More to the point, Stubbs offers a convincing psychological portrait, and the effect is a book that is deeply moving and startling in its scope.

In the course of his life, Donne metamorphosed from a libidinous and love-struck poet to the intimidating dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, making it difficult to create a cohesive narrative. He was a poet and priest, but he was also a sailor and captain of a fleet ensnarled in the ongoing diplomatic tiffs between England and Spain, off and on from 1596-1598. He then was appointed the secretary to the Lord Keeper of the Seal, Sir Thomas Egerton. Before both of those occupations, he became well-versed in the law as a scholar at the Inns of Court. Suffice to say, his life was complex enough to deter even the most ambitious biographer. Stubbs wisely resists the urge to offer conjecture as to the biographical intent of those poems for which it would be especially precarious, and the bulk of the biography appropriately hinges on the hundreds of letters Donne sent to various friends and patrons.

Here is what those letters tell us, more or less: his life, which spanned from 1572-1631, was hardly less intricate than a fugue, and remarkable to the point of disbelief. He was forced to leave Oxford some time before he was sixteen, unwilling to sign the requisite Oath of Allegiance to the Queen and the Reformed Church. The son of an ironmonger, he spent much of his life pursuing two related goals: a higher social position than that of his birth, and protection against the martyrdom his family had experienced repeatedly as Catholics in an intolerant Protestant England. Donne came from a long line of Papists; Sir Thomas More was his maternal great-great-grandfather. More, as Chancellor to Henry VIII, had been responsible for the deaths of many Protestants via public burning; he was rewarded for his “protection” of Henry VIII with a beheading. One imagines that it was in part this legacy that made Donne’s mother refuse to relinquish Catholicism, even to the point of exile. Donne’s brother Henry died after being tortured and thrown in prison for harboring a Catholic priest. To give us a sense of the nature of punishments for being a Papist sympathizer, Stubbs relates this gruesome tale: while Henry languished in prison, the priest was condemned to death; upon being brought to the scaffold, one of the men responsible for his sentence cried out “thou didst say the Queen was a tyrant!” To which the priest, using some of his last breaths, shouted back that he had never done so, “but I say you are a tyrant and a bloodsucker.” He was unsuccessfully hanged and then publicly disemboweled and his intestines set on fire while the dying man watched. Decades later Donne would write, as one of the only important men in his time to decry torture as unchristian, “I haue seene at some Executions of Trayterous Priests, some bystanders pray to him whose body lay there dead”; it is not impossible that Donne would have been there to witness the gruesome death of his brother’s friend.

Read more of Alison Powell's review here, or get a copy now!

College Girl: Not Your Expected Novel

College Girl

Although I am an English major, I would not consider myself a "book snob." Scattered between the Dickens and Tolstoy novels on my bookshelf are Sophie Kinsella's Shopaholic series and other embarrassing choices.

And while these books are not great pieces of literature, they are enjoyable and light reads. College Girl,by Patricia Weitz, seemed like just that sort of book. The fact that Diablo Cody, who wrote the screenplay for Juno, gave it a stellar review was just an additional incentive to read the book. If she gave it praise, then it had to be worthwhile.

My first impression was wrong.

The main problem with the novel is the protagonist, Natalie Bloom. A college senior, she transfers to the University of Connecticut late in her four-year college career. Coming from a commuter school, it is understandable that she has trouble finding her niche at a time when everyone around her has already found their own.

A flawed central character is generally the seed for any decent novel. But Weitz has made the main character too flawed. Along with social awkwardness, anxiety and poor self-image, she has a troubled family life and terrible influences in the form of "friends."

Weitz's descriptions of Natalie's day-to-day life should be noted, however. Weitz portrays Natalie's startling lack of understanding about herself and the world with vivid examples of her thoughts and interactions. The descriptions will certainly make any reader cringe, but that can be attributed to the scenarios rather than the author's literary voice.

Read more of Christina Warner's review, or get a copy now!