1. Finding Iris Changby Paula Kamen
Iris Chang was the author of three books, including the blockbuster
The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of WWII. Kamen, also an accomplished journalist and author of four books, was first Iris's rival at the University of Illinois Champagne-Urbana and then, for many years, an admiring and close friend. Kamen's is a book by a writer about a writer, or rather, the biography of a rich and evolving writerly friendship with a violent end, for Iris Chang was found shot to death in a car by the side of the road near her home in northern California. Chang was then working on a book about the Bataan Death March, and as she had a small son, a happy marriage, and blazingly successly career, many people found it easy to believe she had been murdered, though, as Kamen explains at length, Chang's life was not what it appeared. Kamen's is a deeply moving book that should be read by anyone who is or would be a writer; it's a terrible lesson in the dangers of unbalanced ambition and, at the same time, ironically, the advantages of unbounded ambition. Beautifully written and researched, this is a work to be savored, both on the page, and in many meditations afterwards. I know I will be rereading this one.
2. The Big Short
By Michael Lewis
I relished Lewis's late 1980s memoir of working at Salmon Brothers,
Liar's Poker, which I would describe as laugh-out-loud funny and grimly picaresque.
The Big Short is equally entertaining, but, well, not funny. It is in fact horrifying. Unlike many books on financial shenanigans, this one is written by someone who actually worked in investment banking, who has an insider's understanding of the culture and the mentality of those, alas, not so few, who aim to "game the system." So what happened to the financial system in 2008? To begin to understand, start here.
2. When a Crocodile Ate the Sunby Peter Godwin
It might seem an exotic horror story: Mugabe's Zimbabwe. But it's so much larger than that. What transpires when the government really, truly, breaks down? How do you find bread when your money inflates to near-nothing? What happens to the old people? To the animals? The crops? And the names of things? In other words, this is a story at once ancient and ever-new, a story that, for as long human nature and human societies endure, we will go on telling in its thousands of permutations. But this time, this book, wow.
4. Las tentaciones de la dicha
by Agustín Cadena
Who is Agustín Cadena? Think: Franz Kafka meets Juan Rulfo meets Raymond Carver or, the Mexican Chekhov. But that's not quite right: he's unique. I've just finished translating one of the stories, "The Vampire"--- hope to have news soon about a home for that. And some excellent, though to me, unexpected news: this book was named one of the top books of 2010 by Mexican critic Carlos Olivares Baró.
P.S. Read my translation of an earlier short story by Cadena,
"Lady of the Seas," which appears in
Mexico: A Traveler's Literary Companion.4. The Bolter
by Frances Osborne
A superbly written biography of Idina Sackville, "the woman who scandalized 1920s Society and became
White Mischief's infamous seductress," by her own great granddaughter. Every chapter is a surprise, and the last one more than any. (Oddly, this gave me a more nuanced appreciation for the decor in the Ralph Lauren shops.)
5. John Bankhead Magruder: A Military Reappriasal
by Thomas M. Settles
This new biography of a key 19th century military figure, best known as a controversial Confederate general who defended Virginia and Galveston,Texas in the U.S. Civil War, it is also crucial reading for anyone interested in the U.S.-Mexican War, the Civil War, and / or Mexico's Second Empire.
6. Black Robes in Paraguay
by William F. Jaenike
This magnificent, deeply and scrupulously researched book will always have a place of honor in my library. It should interest anyone who enjoys Latin American history -- and that includes the history of Mexico's Baja California, because of the parallel stories of their Jesuit missions.
7. Move Into Life: The Nine Essentials of Lifelong Vitalityby Anat Baniel
Protégée of Moishe Feldenkrais, the Israeli engineer and Judo expert who developed the renowned "Feldenkrais Method," Anat Baniel built her own "Anat Baniel Method" (ABM) on this foundation and three decades of helping thousands of people, from the tiniest babies to elders, move more easily and find freedom from pain. I have tried the ABM: gadzooks, it works! This book is a fine introduction to the method, and all-around inspiring. P.S. Her
video beats a cup of coffee.
8. The Art of Intuitionby Sophy Burnham
A broad and knowledgable overview of issues related to and methods for accessing intuition, this is a most unusual book because it is written by a mystic and a literary artist: one and same person. Though Burnham is best known for her
New York Times best-selling books on angels, some of her earlier books, especially
The Art Crowd and
The Landed Gentry, deserve far more recognition than they have yet received.
9.
The Permit That Never Expiresby Philip Garrison
Anyone who wants to understand Mexican immigration should read this book -- and it's a gripping read, for Garrison is at once stylish, unusually perceptive, wryly humorous, and, above all, both compassionate and deeply knowledgeable. This is an astonishingly original and important work.
10.
Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Ageby Clay Shirky
I don't know Clay Shirky but, from his description of his childhood, we could have been next door neighbors, for I too recall hours planted, zombie-like, in front of
Batman and
Gilligan's Island. So what happens to our culture as a whole when we move from passive to active-- even for the merest smidgen of time? As they used to say on
Batman,
"sha-zam!" (Only Clay Shirky could get me to sign up for
LOL Cats. Oh, yes, it was a-meow-zing.)
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Top 10 Books Read 2009--->
Top 10 Books Read 2008--->
Top 10 Books Read 2007--->
Top 10 Books Read 2006More anon.
This is a grenade of a book. Based on extensive investigative reporting on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, Sam Quinones’ Dreamland tells the deeply unsettling story of the production, smuggling, and marketing of semi-processed opium base— or “black tar heroin”— originating in and around Xalisco, a farm town in the state of Nayarit, and in tandem, the story of the aggressive marketing of pain pills in the U.S.— in particular, of Purdue Pharma’s OxyContin—and the resulting conflagration of addiction and death. [CONTINUE READING MY REVIEW FOR LITERAL]
A strange, tragic, and expertly told story. I am powerfully grateful that Miss Charles and Mr Warrior and other members of the Seminole Negro community in Bracketville, Texas so generously shared their story with Jeff Guinn and that he, in turn, took the trouble to research and write such a fine book. Deservedly, Our Land Before We Die won the Texas Book Award after it was first published in 2002. (And thanks, Augusta Pines and Windy Goodloe of the Seminole Negro Indian Scout Cemetery Association for the recommendation. I'll have much more to say about this book and the Seminole Negro Scouts in my book about Far West Texas. Stay tuned.)
Now that my own book, Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution, is out in the world and on its own way, I haven't been delving into metaphysical literature so intensively as before. I miss the way-out wigginess of it— and I know, it's not for everyone. But in a way, it's a relief to have moved on because usually, in terms of literary quality, metaphysical literature can be cloggy sloggin'. So this elegant and sensitively told memoir of growing up as the son of a decorator-turned-psychic healer in Florida— oh, yeah, it's wiggy— was an especially scrumptious read.
# 7. The Edge of the World : A Cultural History of the North Sea and the Transformation of Europe By Michael PyeThis is the first major biography in over 40 years of one of the most important figures of the Mexican Revolution. Caballero is also the ex-mayor of El Paso, Texas and, in his words "a recovering lawyer"— a background that no doubt helped him unravel the conspiracy he found revealed in the one hundred year-old records of the Culberson County Courthouse, apparently intended to cover up what really happened to Pascual Orozco and his men in the High Lonesome Mountains south of Van Horn in 1915. Caballero's Lynching Pascual Orozco is an important contribution to the history of not only the Mexican Revolution, but of the state of Chihuahua and of Far West Texas.
This is a 1,000 candle review, but I should start by saying I am the last person who would attend an Amanda Palmer concert because I don't like loud, I don't like crowds, and especially feisty crowds, and most things explicit make my toes curl. As far as music goes, I'm more an opera-at-the-Kennedy-Center kind of person (and that would include some fairly way-out opera, by the way). I have zip to do with the music business; I write literary fiction, poetry, and essay. But Amanda Palmer, you're a hero to me because you're an artist as shaman, and that's what it's all about, and in The Art of Asking, you explain this beautifully and with bodacious heart. For both myself and my writing students, I maintain a list of recommended books on process. I'm a voracious reader but it has been a long Gobi Desert of a time since I've read anything to add to this list. Today, with a big fat star, I add The Art of Asking. And not because the book is about asking— and "taking the donuts," as Palmer puts it— indeed, something for which most writers, and especially women writers, need some coaching— but because what it's really about is the meaning and the reality of being a true artist. That the true artist is a kind of shaman— we forget this in the noise, shiny plastic, and conformity of industrial culture. Remembering it is a profound gift.
Of course I'd already seen the 1956 movie starring Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, and James Dean. Finally, I got around to reading the novel. It struck me as a Texan (cattle vs oil) version of War and Peace, gorgeous and even transcendent in places, yet glaringly flawed in others. I do believe that Tolstoy himself would applaud the effort and verve of this giant of a book.
