Zoe Heller's The Believers: Queen of Literary Anti-Heroines

The Believers

Move over Scarlet O’Hara. Your reign as the queen of literary anti-heroines is over. The mantle of unlikability now belongs to Audrey Litvinoff, the foul-mouthed, abusive, self-centred protagonist in Brit-lit author Zoë Heller’s latest novel, The Believers.

From the moment we meet her as a young woman with “dark flowers of perspiration blossoming at the armholes of her dress,” until, in her late 50s, she buries her philandering husband (“If he weren’t in a coma, I’d like to give him a good smack”), Audrey is an insensitive, bigoted bully, so rude to her long-suffering family and friends that even Scarlet would be scandalized. At least the southern belle could feign charm from time to time. Audrey never bothers.

It’s difficult to understand how Joel Litvinoff, the activist left-wing New York lawyer that Audrey married 40 years earlier, was able to tolerate his wife’s abrasive (if adoring) attentions for so long. Evidently his work defending the world’s downtrodden (from Palestinian terrorists to Attica prison rioters to an Arab American with al-Qaeda connections) was sufficient distraction, that and his eye for the ladies. In any event, we’ll never know because in the novel’s opening pages, Joel is rendered comatose by a massive stroke.

Read the rest of Cecily Ross's review here, or get a copy of The Believers now!

Connecting Kids With Nature Through The Seasons: New Book Gives Natural Sense of Wonder

A Natural Sense of Wonder: Connecting Kids with Nature through the Seasons

I have read three books this past year that I consider to be game-changers; books that subtly shifted and guided the path I want to walk in life. These were books that caused me to stop to examine and clarify exactly what sort of person, what sort of parent, I want to be.

The first was Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life,which redefined the way I look at food and moved me to live a more sustainable lifestyle. The second, Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder,opened my eyes to the importance of unstructured nature play on the human psyche. The third was Rick Van Noy’s A Natural Sense of Wonder: Connecting Kids with Nature through the Seasons.

While Last Child in the Woodsis broad, an issue-based philosophical and intellectual work, A Natural Sense of Wonderis a personal compilation of essays touchingly recounting one father’s attempts to cultivate a love of nature in his children. An essay, Van Noy says, “is an attempt. This book is a collection of essays about our attempts to get outside.”

The essays are loosely based on the seasons, moving from walking to school to thwarted attempts to find a frozen pond suitable for skating upon, to swimming holes, tree houses, and tide pools. (My personal favorite dealt with vultures, birds every bit as fascinating as they are creepy.) They are a pleasure to read; humorous, beautifully written and clearly influenced by passionate naturalists such as Rachel Carson, Henry David Thoreau, and E.O. Wilson. Each essay rings with wonder and awe, both for the world around him and the children beside him, and the tone never veers toward preachy or sanctimonious.

Read the rest of Robin Elton's review here, or get a copy of A Natural Sense of Wonder now!

George Mallory and the First Ascent of Everest: New Mystery Novel

Paths of Glory

British author Jeffrey Archer seeks to scale Everest in his latest novel, a story based on the life and times of George Mallory whose attempt to climb the world's highest peak in 1924 is still shrouded in mystery.

And unlike earlier false starts, the writer as famous for his politics and imprisonment as his prose is confident that this time his book will make it to the big screen.

Paths of Glorywhich hits shelves on Thursday and is published by Macmillan, is a fictionalised account of Mallory, the British climber who may or may not have reached the summit of Everest before dying on the mountain in June, 1924.

His frozen remains were discovered 75 years later hundreds of feet below the peak, and the climbing community is divided to this day over whether Mallory was the first person to stand on the roof of the world.

For Archer, best known for pacy thrillers like Kane and Abeland Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less,Mallory was not an obvious choice. But he was drawn to the story by late friend Chris Brasher, and, once he started his research he was gripped.

"I got so involved that I wished I was 24, and wished Mallory had said to me 'I want you to come on the trip with me'," Archer, 68, said in an interview.

Read more of Jeffrey Archer's interview here, or get a copy of Paths of Glory now!

Photography Book Captures Heart of Somali Diaspora

The Somali Diaspora: A Journey Away

In black and white photographs, award-winning documentary photographer Abdi Roble chronicles the lives of Somalis from the refugee camps in Kenya, to their new homes in different parts of the world. A picture, as the saying goes, tells a thousand words.

The Somali Diaspora: A Journey Awayby Abdi Roble and Doug Rutledge does exactly this, and perhaps much more. Roble and Rutledge, of the Somali Diaspora Project, combine their talents to share the realities, histories, and dreams of Somalis from a wide range of experiences. From the refugee camp to resettlement – they capture the presence and impact of a people whose country remains torn by 18 years of unremitting violence. Their complete work attempts to fill a void by historians and mass media.

Minneapolis community organizer Hashi Abdi is credited for giving the book its structure, which divides the phases Somali immigrant life into three experiences. The first is dependence, reflecting the refugee camp experience. This period is followed by preparation, as lived in many American cities. The final phase is participation – a phase best illustrated by Somalis in Minnesota. This community challenged the notion that active participation entails assimilation, and while the Diaspora elsewhere continues to prepare, they maintain that Somalis in Minnesota are fully engaged.

At the height of the Somali Civil War documentarian Ali Said’s home was looted and destroyed taking with it the history of Somalis through the lens of the country’s only photographer. Said’s loss gave purpose to the book and the project.

And so begins Rutledge and Roble’s extensive documentation of one of the largest Diaspora communities in America.

Read more of Ramla Bile's review here, or get a copy of The Somali Diaspora: A Journey Away now!

New Spy Thriller from the Master: The Tourist by Olen Steinhauer

The Tourist

The Touristis a spy novel that begins on Sept. 10, 2001, with an elaborately engineered prologue that culminates in a violent confrontation in Venice. The next section of the book takes place in July 2007. The Touristhas jumped to Blackdale, Tennessee, and to a new chapter in the life of its title character, Milo Weaver.

From these facts you might assume that this narrative has moved forward in simple chronological order. But if you believed that, The Touristwould like you to know that you would not make a very good spy.

Why? Because Olen Steinhauer's narrative is so carefully larded with lies of omission that there are aspects of the Venice scene that will not be noticed, much less examined, until we are much more deeply immersed in this trickily convoluted novel. Steinhauer's book also operates on the principle that this story's secrets can be coaxed forth only indirectly "because it's a known fact that no decent intelligence operative believes anything he's told."

The lazy writer of espionage plots need only concoct a world-weary agent and then send him through a string of perilous escapades.

Steinhauer does something much more interesting. Rather than merely describe Milo Weaver's dizzying exploits, he replicates them; he immerses his reader in the same kind of uncertainty that Milo faces at every turn.

So characters in The Touristhave multiple names, opaque motives, deceptive marching orders and vast capacities for duplicity.

Read more of Janet Maslin's review here, or get a copy of The Tourist now!

New Novel From Acclaimed Author: Cutting For Stone by Abraham Verghese

Cutting for Stone: A novel

“I will not cut for stone,” runs the text of the Hippocratic oath, “even for patients in whom the disease is manifest; I will leave this operation to be performed by practitioners, specialists in this art.”

Those words provide an epigraph partway through Abraham Verghese’s first novel, Cutting for Stone,and also explain the surname of its narrator, Marion Stone, along with his twin brother, Shiva, and their father, the almost entirely absent surgeon Thomas Stone. Absent in body only: in spirit, Thomas’s disappearance after their birth haunts and drives this book.

Yet until the reader comes across the oath, well into the novel, the title may seem pleasing to the ear but puzzling to the mind: it tries to do too many jobs at once. It neither suggests the book’s action — as, say, “Digging to America” does — nor evokes its mood, as “Bleak House” does. Still, Verghese strives for the empathy of Anne Tyler and the scope of Dickens. If he doesn’t quite manage either, he is to be admired for his ambition.

Verghese is a physician and an already accomplished author. His two nonfiction books, My Own Countryabout AIDS in rural Tennessee, and The Tennis Partner,a moving and honest memoir of a difficult, intimate friendship, are justly celebrated. His commitment to both his professions is admirable: currently a professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine, he also holds an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. But why mention qualifications? What do qualifications matter where fine writing is concerned? Not at all, is the correct answer, and yet qualifications like Verghese’s are tribute, at the very least, to his stalwart effort. This effort is both the making and the unmaking of Cutting for Stone.

Read more of Erica Wagner's review here, or get a copy Cutting for Stone now!

The History of Medicine: New Book Talks About Going from Good to Bad Medicine

Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates

By far the most interesting book I read this year is Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates,by David Wootton.

Wootton is a historian at the University of York. He's no medical profession basher, thanking modern medicine for saving his life and also admitting his daughter is a doctor. You can read more about the book at his Web site.

Not only is the book incredibly well written — even if, like me, you have no particular interest in the history of medicine — it's a mesmerizing look at how a supposedly scientific and evidence-based profession rejected new innovations, knowledge, and theories, while stubbornly clinging to their old — and completely ineffectual, if not down right lethal — therapies.

The parallels between this and moving beyond the billable hour and timesheets are uncanny.

Bad Medicine Drives Out Good Medicine

The history of medicine begins with Hippocrates in the fifth century BC. Yet until the invention of antibiotics in the 1940s doctors, in general, did their patients more harm than good.

In other words, for 2400 years patients believed doctors were doing good; for 2300 years they were wrong.

From the 1st century BC to the mid-nineteenth century, the major therapy was bloodletting, performed with a special knife called a lancet. Interestingly enough, that is the title of today's prestigious English medical journal, The Lancet. 

Bad ideas die hard.

Bloodletting had its opponents of course, but the debate was over where in the body to draw the blood from, not over its effectiveness.

Read more of or Ron Baker's review here, or get a copy of Bad Medicinenow!