February

The Bill From My Father: A Memoir by Bernard Cooper.
Cooper takes a familiar trope – a complex and unreliable parent – and gives it a unique spin as he looks back on his stormy relationship with his father.  Edward Cooper was a prominent Los Angeles divorce attorney, once seemingly invincible (at least to the author), but now sinking into dementia, whose constant philandering was hardly a secret from his sons (or presumably, his wife).  Now, with his mother and all three of his older brothers dead, Bernard felt it was important to understand the complications of his bond with this most difficult man, which means trying to come to grips with his father’s strong disapproval of both his choice of career as a writer (the elder Cooper wanted Bernard to become a lawyer, as all three of his brothers did) and his homosexuality.  As you might imagine, the father/son relationship is not improved when his father sends him a bill for nearly two million dollars – the cost of raising him.  This moving account is liberally leavened with humor, and presented in a spirit of good humor, so that it never morphs into the oh-poor-me school of autobiography. 

In the Company of the Courtesan by Sarah Dunant.
Dunant cements her place here in the ranks of outstanding contemporary historical novelists. The time is 1527, during and after the second sack of Rome by Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor; the beautiful and seductive courtesan, Fiammetta Bianchini, and her business manager and best friend, the dwarf Bucino, flee Rome and end up in Venice, the city of Fiammetta’s birth. There, during a time that is rife with hypocrisy and betrayal at every level of society, the two embark on the difficult task of regaining both their fortunes and their social positions. Dunant’s writing is rich with period details. Her characters - even the minor ones - pulse with life.  Any fan of historical fiction – indeed, anyone who’s drawn to well-written prose and three-dimensional characters – should find Dunant’s book a treat.

Minaret by Leila Aboulela.
When Najwa and her family are exiled to London, after a coup overthrows the government of Sudan and her father is hanged by the rebels, she turns to her Islamic faith - long abandoned in her ultra-secular upbringing - for comfort. One of the things I found so compelling in Minaret, the first of Leila Aboulela’s works of fiction to appear in the United States, is that Najwa’s turn towards Islam seems completely believable.  In addition to its restrained, pitch-perfect writing, Aboulela’s novel offers Western readers a different picture of Islam (and the role of women in the Muslim religion) than the one we have tended to get both from our popular press and from other recent novels dealing with the subject (such as Monica Ali’s Brick Lane). I thought about Najwa and her experiences long after I finished the book and returned it to the library, always a sign of a book worth reading.

Piece of My Heart by Peter Robinson.
I’d encourage fans of the popular mystery novels of Elizabeth George and Colin Dexter to try those of the less well known Peter Robinson.  Robinson’s tautly written, well-imagined novels of suspense all feature Chief Detective Inspector Alan Banks, and are set in Yorkshire, in the north of England.  Like several others in the series, in Piece of My Heart the crime Banks is brought in to solve has its roots deep in the past.  This time, a rock music journalist is found murdered and, try as they might, the police can’t seem to come up with a motive for the killing.  In this novel, though, we get two crimes for the price of one: Robinson alternates chapters between accounts of the current investigation and that of a past crime – the stabbing death of a young woman at a rock festival in 1969. The story of how these two crimes – separate by more than three decades - are linked, and who’s responsible for each, provides several hours of enjoyable reading. 

The Trouble With Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine by Paul Collins.
Collins tells of the strange events that followed the death in 1809 of his subject, author of the iconic sentence “These are the times that try men’s souls,” which urged the American colonists toward rebellion against England. Collins’ search for the whereabouts of the physical remains of one of our Founding Fathers becomes an exploration of the radical Paine’s influence on American thought throughout the nearly two centuries since he died. His research takes him from America to England, from piano bars to saloons, from well known historical figures such as Benjamin Franklin and Walt Whitman, to other lesser known (but still real) characters.  Collins writes with palpable affection for Paine, and tells an entertaining tale about his odd fate.  He’s the unusual sort of historian who chooses to explore the byways of history rather than its highways – and readers are fortunate that he does.

The Night Journal by Elizabeth Crook.
All her life thirty-something Meg Mabry, the heroine of Crook’s third novel, has resisted the spell of her great-grandmother Hannah Bass, whose diaries, written in the 1890s, have become required reading for anyone interested in the history of the American Southwest.  Out of rebellion against both her flighty mother and her domineering maternal grandmother Bassie, Meg became a scientist and an avowed anti-romantic.  But when Bassie decides to revisit her childhood home in New Mexico, Meg reluctantly agrees to accompany her. There, where Hannah Bass fell in love, married, gave birth to Bassie, and died of consumption at 31, Meg somewhat unwillingly unearths the family secrets that Hannah chose to leave out of her diaries. The setting for this tale of three generations of complicated and dynamic women is so well evoked and inviting that I thought about planning my next vacation in New Mexico.  Readers who enjoyed Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose will likely enjoy Crook’s novel as well.

Rise and Shine by Anna Quindlen.
I’ve eagerly followed Quindlen’s lively and insightful writing since the 1980s, when she began writing op-ed pieces for The New York Times and then went on to become a columnist in Newsweek.  Her novels seldom let me down, either. In her fifth work of fiction she explores the sometimes fraught relationship between two very different sisters.  Meghan Fitzmaurice is a Katie Couric-like media star on morning television, while her younger sister Bridget, who’s always idolized her older sister, is a social worker.  When Meghan, not realizing she’s in front of a live microphone, describes her just departed guest in a sentence filled with profanities, both her life and career take a sharp turn downward, and she flees New York without letting anyone know where she’s gone.  Bridget is called upon to pick up the pieces of Meghan’s life and as a result begins to see her sister in a new light. One of the many pleasures of this novel is Quindlen’s sharp and sassy observations about the lives of the rich and famous in contemporary Manhattan. 

Dealing With Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede.
Long before J. K. Rowling arrived on the scene, Patricia C. Wrede was writing terrific fantasies for fourth through eighth graders.  (Her books for teens and adults are well worth reading as well.)  This first book in the high-spirited Enchanted Forest Chronicles is my favorite.  Witty and well-written, the series features a dynamic pair of heroines – the indomitable and rebellious Princess Cimorene and the dragon Kazul.  We first meet Cimorene as she is deciding that she would much rather even keep house for dragons (the worst fate she can imagine) than live a humdrum life as a princess in her parent’s castle.  She needn’t worry – there’s plenty of danger and adventure coming her way: together, Cimorene and Kazul must figure out how to foil a dastardly plan concocted by a group of evil wizards. 

Love Walked In by Marisa de los Santos.
Cornelia Brown, the utterly charming and sympathetic heroine of Marisa de los Santos’s first novel is a movie fanatic (she’s practically memorized The Philadelphia Story) and a hopeless romantic. When Martin Grace (who could pass for Cary Grant even in the light of day) walks into the Philadelphia café where she works, Cornelia is sure that she’s found her dream man (or at least her dream man not counting Cary Grant), only to discover early on that it’s his estranged 11-year-old daughter, Clare, who has really captured her heart.  Readers will love Clare as much as Cornelia does.  And we can all look forward to the upcoming film starring Sarah Jessica Parker.  

The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn.
Ever since he was a child, Daniel Mendelsohn loved to listen to his grandfather’s tales about their family’s long and eventful history. He was especially interested in hearing about his great-uncle Shmiel, whom he closely resembles, and who remained behind in Ukraine with his family when the rest of his family emigrated to the United States.  All anyone really knew about their fate was that they were “killed by the Nazis,” as his grandfather told him. As he went through some family mementos, Mendelsohn discovered a series of increasingly frantic letters from Shmiel begging his American relatives for help in getting his wife and four daughters away from Hitler’s rapidly approaching “final solution." Here Mendelsohn has written an account of the investigation into what happened to Great Uncle Shmiel and his family. His search takes him all the way from Bolechow, the shtetl where the family lived, to Australia, Israel, and Scandinavia.  I put off reading this book for a long time, mostly because I felt it would simply be too painful. And, of course, many parts of it are, especially as we discover the fates of each of his six lost relatives, but this impressive and poignant narrative has much to say about loss and remembrance, about the ties of family and the power of memory to animate the past.

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan.
Most people’s knowledge and understanding of the Dust Bowl is largely shaped by John Steinbeck’s engrossing novel The Grapes of Wrath, his story of American families fleeing the great drought that afflicted our country’s midsection during the 1930s, and their migration westward to California to make new lives for themselves. Now, in Egan’s National Book Award-winning The Worst Hard Time, we hear, in the words of those who stayed behind, what life was like during the “dirty thirties” in the great plains of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, New Mexico, and Colorado, an area that, over plowed and over planted, had, literally, gone with the wind. Whether it’s a description of the wind storm of Black Sunday, April 14, 1935, which blew more than 300,000 tons of topsoil off the plains (twice as much dirt as was excavated in the building of the Panama Canal), or an exploration of the effects of the Depression and eight years of drought on the lives of these hitherto unknown men and women, Egan’s superb journalistic talents bring the time, the people, and the place to life. 

Viva la Repartee: Clever Comebacks and Witty Retorts From History’s Greatest Wits and Wordsmiths by Dr. Mardy Grothe.
You're sure to enjoy these wonderful examples of funny or nasty or intelligent (or all three) quotes from such diverse folk as Bill Moyers, Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Disraeli, Calvin Coolidge, and Dorothy Parker.  This is the sort of book you don’t want to read too quickly or too much of at any one time, the better to savor the many great lines, like what John Kennedy answered when someone asked him how he became a war hero – “It was involuntary. They sank my boat.” It’s a veritable tutorial on conversational brilliance. Sadly, of course, those of us who aren’t among history’s greatest wits and wordsmiths generally think of the perfect thing to say, if we think of it at all, only after the perfect moment for saying it has passed. (The philosopher Denis Diderot gave this phenomenon a name: l’esprit de l’escalier--the wit of the staircase. And Heywood Broun, the American writer, once defined repartee as “what you wish you’d said.”)  However, this delightful compendium will at least give you hours of rib-tickling enjoyment, whether or not you can recall any of the examples when you most need them.